pbmonster
3mo ago
Because that's not what they voted about. They voted about putting a hard limit on their population. And realistically, limiting immigration from non-EU countries wouldn't have bought them much time - that's consistently less than a quarter of new immigrants. But again, they didn't vote about that. They could have, but decided to vote on something else.
pbmonster
3mo ago
A large ratio of the population supports at least some immigration (the Swiss referendum to cap the population failed).
To clarify, that referendum failed because it was stupid. Capping the population directly requires dissolving all ~20 bilateral agreements with the EU in the near future, which has been voted on several times before and which is (for prudent economic reasons) extremely unpopular with the constituency. It would be more catastrophic than Brexit, economically.
And the EU has repeatedly been very clear on the matter: if Switzerland wants to keep its current level of economic integration into the EU, freedom of movement is not optional. All bilateral agreements will be dissolved if freedom of movement goes.
So, the referendum was a pointless populist gesture. The votes it got (45%) was from people who want to cancel all the ties to the EU anyway, and people who didn't care enough to understand this simple point.
I mean, you can't really force it. You would have to break up their communities by force and reeducate them, in a "kill the Indian and save the man" kind of way. Perhaps it is not physically impossible, but it would certainly require the kind of cruelty you are trying to avoid here.
I think it could be done way less cruel. Start with the ghettos - most immigrants live in rentals, and you can require apartment buildings and/or street blocks to be inhabited (in the case of Sweden) by exactly 80% natives, 7% Arabs, 2% Finns, 1% Poles, ect - by law. A bit draconian for the land lord, who now needs to choose from a far smaller pool of applicants, but not exactly horrible. And if you remove the ghettos, being "clannish, inward-looking, and outwardly hostile" becomes a lot harder.
The education could be a requirement for the work permit or welfare payments. Target women and children specifically. In the end I'm an optimist, I think the western value system itself is so superior, it will propagate itself eventually when/if enough friction towards active resistance is introduced. Get woman and children out of the house early and consistently, enforce language.
Segregated communities (which do and will form naturally), then policing their border.
Has the formation of ghettos ever turned out well? Usually, you'd want to do the opposite. Force integration, encourage assimilation. Teach the language, the culture, make attending mandatory. Even if they re-migrate (voluntary or not) later, you almost certainly will get better social outcomes for the host population that way - and outcomes for people not caged in ghettos is certainly better. Most famously, Singapore was rather successful in integrating their (poorer, less educated, majority Muslim) Malay minority into society by doing just that - they went as far as requiring single appartment buildings to mirror the ethical make-up of Singapore itself. No ghettos, by any means necessary.
In the end, it sounds like you want to minimize welfare spending, so you can't keep up ghetto containment very well anyway since everybody needs to get to work.
My impression is that most able-bodied refugees will voluntarily take low-paying jobs.
That's not very leftist of you. Doing that will depress working class power, making your native low-skilled population poorer, which is exactly the reason most right-wing governments absolutely suck at limiting immigration effectively.
pbmonster
4mo ago
Huh, interesting. That one was firmly on the long list of labels I was fairly confident to be complete garbage. I never buy that stuff, and my last three cars made it well past 200k without a single instance of engine troubles. "Gunk" in the engine itself sounds like such a 1970's problem, I haven't ever heard of anybody having trouble with that.
pbmonster
4mo ago
That's called fraud.
In the US, the FDA defines what "SPF50" even means. They have norms and test protocols to ensure this significance. Without the FDA, coconut oil has SPF50 for all intents and purposes. Could some other industry committee define "SPF", and sue cosmetic companies that use it wrongly? Sure. But I have to think for a long time until I can think of the first product at a supermarket that has an industry-defined label I respect (in fact, I can only think of greenwashing labels I don't trust ("fair trade", "organic") and technical standards I trust unconditionally ("USB-C" is a very reliable label, even on AliExpress).
We can enforce against fraud without requiring genuine suppliers to pay tens or hundreds of millions of dollars "proving safety" of something widely used around the world without issue.
Can we? Sunscreen is like the lowest common denominator, and it already gets tricky. Someone has to check for efficacy and side effects. The age of mineral-based UV filters is long past, today sunscreen often contains organic UV filters. A common conspiracy theory is that those organic rings are more harmful than sunburn itself - so someone better check side effects. And, sure enough, the organic UV filters from the 80s easily end up in detectable doses in blood, urine and breast milk of people who use them, and sure enough, they interact (weakly) with estrogen, androgen, or thyroid hormone receptors. Should this be allowed? Is this still acceptable? And should we really let sun screen producers answer those questions for us? (Ironically, those old aromatics are still in use today in US sun screen, most other countries have moved on to newer, larger and better organic filters, which the FDA hasn't evaluated yet and which pass through the skin much less readily)
Lots of regulations are even made just to make it more difficult for competition to exist
Yes, without doubt. I'm not actually all that pro regulations. But that doesn't mean we can just remove them all, Chesterton’s Fence is there for a reason - maybe not a good reason, but I like my food and my drugs well tested. My barber may be held to lower standards.
the FDA seeks out products that meets its standards, and/or creates its own approved baseline?
To preserve any kind of quality, this means multi-stage trials and double blind studies. That's where the cost is. Don't get me wrong, I don't think the current system is good. But it is extremely difficult to improve it.
Better start small: I think FDA exemptions for terminally ill patients with informed consent should be fast-tracked and default-approved. Maybe add some profit limit to prevent exploitation of the desperate.
Or a larger step: identify international partner organizations with adequate quality control. If something has been legal in Japan or the EU for five years, strongly accelerated approval should be possible.
pbmonster
4mo ago
Since that "FDA approved" label on the box is likely to cost millions (maybe billions) of dollars, I don't think you can make it optional. The price discrimination would be too large, and many products categories would stop entirely having new products FDA approved, leaving us only with the "legacy FDA" products already in the market.
pbmonster
4mo ago
The FDA is already really bad for this, the US government takes an approach that everything is basically banned until "proven" safe. Our default is that you are a moron who can't be trusted to take any risk. And this means small stuff like why you can't buy good sunscreen, to more serious issues like why it's difficult for terminally ill patients to try new risky procedures
The alternative is clearly worse. Because what sucks more than not having Euro sunscreen? Giving someone money for a jar of "SPF50 coconut oil" and burning lobster red. Giving somebody money for bootleg Asian sunscreen and getting a batch contaminated with benzene (carcinogenic in California, and everywhere else). Both happened. Both are worse than having a small selection of reliable sunscreen.
And sure, I can do the research myself. But I don't want to do that every time I go shopping. I also don't trust 90% of the population to do it right, especially not against hostile advertising. And sure, both sunscreen brands can be sued under some libertarian arbitration scheme. But I like not having skin cancer more than a 7 figure settlement (or getting nothing besides the privilege of watching my opponent go bankrupt). I can see the argument for experimental drugs for terminally ill patients. But terminally ill people are desperate, and absolutely need some form of protection - at least against financial exploitation.
And don't get me wrong, the FDA isn't really doing a good job here. But it's a job that needs to be done, and probably to a standard that's not so far removed from what is done today. Regulations are written in blood, ect.
pbmonster
4mo ago
I recommend a mechanical engineering project, and doing the CAD 100% yourself. You'll waste a metric ton of filament on prototypes, but you'll learn a lot. You can look up designs online, but not download STLs.
Depending on your skill set you can try building a simple water pump or a pair of tank treads (arbitrarily complex - you can skip road wheels, suspension, return rollers/idlers, and tension wheels for as long as you like). Sometimes, you'll end up buying a small motor to drive your contraption, but also just building the stuff and turning the moving parts by hand is fun.
pbmonster
4mo ago
I thought about that, but that makes going full Jesuit and also changing "Mr." to "Father" the obvious move.
... or "Daddy", I suppose, if we keep the zoomer spelling.
Re-instating Mrs. as a social norm for married or with kids does more for increasing the birth rate than sending checks.
I'm all for it (reserve it for with kids). And to appease the feminists, I propose we introduce an equivalent to Miss for young men without children. Maybe "Squire", or "Cadet".
The Prussians used to do that, young lords were addressed as "Junker" instead of "Herr".
pbmonster
4mo ago
Funny idea. Unfortunately, you can't move the datacenters as easily as you can move the people. Anthropic mostly trains on AWS clusters located in the US, and I wouldn't be surprised if the USG would directly declare them to be a hostile foreign actor if they moved abroad, barring them from doing business with Amazon/Google/SpaceX.
And nobody in Europe can give them any meaningful compute. Hard to overstate how far behind Europe is in the AI race. Maybe the Saudis could jump in, if there's anything left standing there...
pbmonster
4mo ago
I'm another non-miserable tightwad. Most things worth doing are worth doing for less than $5k. That includes travel and countless activities. Diminishing returns, ect.
With a romantic partner, I'd figure out if she actually likes to travel or if she likes to take Instagram selfies in infinity pools. Because flying somewhere interesting and spending two weeks at carefully chosen Airbnbs shouldn't really set back your FIRE time line all that much, at least not if you do it "only" twice a year.
Same with "activities". Even skiing can be done on many days with top tier equipment for $5k - unless she likes telling people about the awesome ski-in ski-out hotel.
There are, of course, things not worth doing for less than $5k. Check if she has aspirations only possible with access to your money. Polo, general aviation, yachting, motor sport, ...
pbmonster
4mo ago
US energy production has been basically flat for the past 25 years. Renewables have been replacing coal with the total largely unchanged.
This is true, but I think you put the cart before the horse: US electricity demand has been flat between 2005 and 2020. Renewables have been replacing aging coal plants that were not economic to run under those conditions - the most expensive generators went off-line first, starting with aging coal plants that would have needed major CAPEX.
Progressives, thanks to funding from China, adopted anti growth strategies and blocked new power plants.
This might have resulted in more environmental protection, making coal even less competitive than it is anyway. But make no mistake, coal would not have been competitive with natural gas plants either way. It's all around worse, not only because the tree hugging hippies getting their way politically. Coal is more expensive to produce (especially since the shale revolution), more expensive to transport, more expensive pre-treatement, the plants are more expensive to staff, the plants are significantly less thermally efficient and the plants are much slower to ramp. And, yes, pollution control is significantly more expensive for coal.
There's a reason why most data centers try everything to get their hands on a gas turbine or to even get a nuke back online, and nobody even thinks about building a mine mouth data center.
People could have built more aluminum/silicone smelters or arc furnaces in the US in 2005, paid market rates for electricity and keep those coal plants going for a little bit longer (until the next gas turbine - or later, solar panel - would have put them out of business anyway). But they built those in China, because steel workers and coal miners and power plant personell are much cheaper there. And yes, pollution control is also cheaper there.
pbmonster
4mo ago
Am I the only person in the world who wasn't familiar with the song "Mr. Brightside"?
No, same. Both my work and my extended family listen to (different) classic/vintage/modern rock radio stations 24/7, and I'm 100% certain this song hasn't been on rotation once on any of them since it was released.
pbmonster
4mo ago
That's unnecessary, right? Neither eggs nor larvae can survive stomach acid. The dangerous thing are female flies laying eggs on you.
pbmonster
4mo ago
With a little bit of luck, that's the absolutely cheapest way to drive for the next couple of years. Even if you buy the cheapest, crappiest Chevy Bolt and charge it only using your solar panels, it's going to be more expensive per mile than this car. I'd try to get this thing to 300k miles out of principle.
pbmonster
4mo ago
Contrary to the other responses, the job can extend to include many of the responsibilities of management of a club. It can be a real, full time job.
The promoter can be the one to book/organize/run logistics for live acts and DJs, control the guest list, be head host, run all of marketing, head of sales, ect.
What alternative investment thesis would you propose?
Global index funds, as always.
There's a chance the AI bubble will look 2001-ish, and I don't think tech is To Big To Fail yet, so they are going to save the banks but let tech go through the market correction. In that case, index funds will bleed badly, but I can just hold and whoever ends up buying the IP and infrastructure for cents on the dollar will be in the index anyway - and the rest of the economy will continue to produce value, so they'll make it through the following credit crunch, inflation and/or interest rate turbulence relatively intact.
And if AI isn't a bubble, performance will be good either way, since most index funds are tech heavy anyway and most other constituents will also greatly benefit from AI takeoff.
pbmonster
4mo ago
I think the question is, why is there no sympathy for Russians wanting to escape conscription
The current answer to that for most of western Europe is "because there's currently no credible fear of conscription for Russian men". The moment the Russian military actually starts drafting and punishing conscious objectors, I expect full asylum rights for Russian men that can show a well-founded fear of persecution or a risk of serious harm.
This is already happening, a Russian anti-war activist could apply for asylum pretty much anywhere in the EU.
pbmonster
4mo ago
You're right, Amazon isn't the best example. For comparison, the rest of FAANG make more than $500k of profits per employee and have been for a long time. Amazon has to many people in comparison - but even here, $50k extra per year makes a significant difference for the janitor. Maybe makes it more obvious that Bezos only got there by exploiting a large number of workers.
In the Mondragon system, the share itself actually has no value, since it is not tradeable by design.
The thing that has value is the capital account, and those typically only vary by how long a worker has been with the company - and it only gets filled with actual profits. So Bezos and janitor #1 have pretty large capital accounts, but the rest of the 1.6M employees have less, since they haven't been with the coop for as long.
pbmonster
4mo ago
which is plainly impossible
I don't think it's that clear cut. If Amazon would have been set up e.g. like the Mondragon Corporation (a worker coop), a janitor with the company from the very start would have been a worker-owner from the beginning, accumulating dividends in his individual capital account within Amazon. His salary would have been lower than Bezo's by orders of magnitude, but the share of the company both of them held and the size of their dividend accounts would have been the same.
Now, Mondragon isn't nearly as large or successful as Amazon - but they are relatively large and successful.
No, that's the normal pattern. The German speaking region always votes a few points more right wing than the rest of the country, pretty much no matter the question.
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