sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
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User ID: 636
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1d ago
Some Bs have As. Not all of them however, have As. So this does not follow.
They do, of course, as you admit yourself. It's merely a "no true Scotsman" of what constitutes a border.
Beyond formalities however, what my argument is at core that a government that does not control who it administers ceases to be one properly speaking because it is easily gamed by outside actors. And therefore decays into some administrative or economic denomination of the larger structure that puppets it.
It's not clear to me why this is true except that you feel strongly about this particular issue. Like if you were a leftist telling me about how governments that don't control inequality cease to be a government "properly speaking" because , I'm not impressed.
The current immigration regime is not unprecedented. There was much more freedom of movement before the latter part of the 20th century than there has been since. In the late 19th and early 20th century, the foreign born share of the population was comparable to what it is today. Was the USA not a government, properly speaking, but merely an economic zone? I don't think so, but if it was, it seems being an economic zone doesn't really mean much for the future trajectory of your country.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1d ago
Again with the absurdity through inappropriate narrowing of scope.
How can you tell when your scope is appropriately widened? Okay, the purpose of the bus system isn't to emit CO2. Is the purpose to do that and drive vehicles on NYC streets? Is the purpose to do that and pay out bennies to bus drivers? Is it to do that and move paying customers around? Is it to do that and also house a few homeless people? Is it to do that and reduce traffic overall?
And we can't look at the bus system in isolation, right? It's part of the city government, which itself is embedded in layers of government and society. Why is it not inappropriate to even attempt to analyze the purpose of the NYC bus system in isolation of the entire world?
At least I agree that we can limit our scope to planet earth, since there doesn't seem to be any agency being exercised by anyone outside of it. The question is where to set the scope in between busses emitting CO2 and everything that goes on on earth.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1d ago
Cool, but the point is that Bs have As, so if something doesn't have an A, it's not a B.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1d ago
I was primed to look, but it was the scripture references that first made me think something was up. At first, knowing nothing about the director (or Korean culture really) I ignorantly thought it was an esl type thing - the foreign director wants to reference Christianity somehow, saw a passage mentioning ghosts and went with it (sort of like how Osgood Perkins jammed T. Rex into longlegs). But it is referenced again later in the film by the girl in white and by that point in the film I had seen too much self-awareness to accept my original assumption about the use of scripture, I'd already started beating myself up for it. It was too on the nose, I just couldn't accept that this apparently clever film was now going to make the girl in white a christ figure by having her actually quote Jesus.
You've confused this - it's actually the Japanese man who references the intro quote, as he transforms into a devil and shows the deacon his stigmata.
Quality movie. I'm not sure what I think happened yet, but my first instinct is that all the three major players are evil, possibly competing to harvest the village's psychic energy via bloody murder or something like that.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
2d ago
Even if a wonder happens and the fertility will rise to replacement level next week, the country would still have massive problems in 30 years.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
2d ago
"The Jews know. Shut it down."
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
2d ago
A country with no borders is not a country, it's an economic zone.
I don't think you can mix these two metaphors popular on the right. Some economic zones have actual walls around them. Not to mention that the conditions of the economic zone obviously don't apply outside the zone, otherwise everything would be in the zone.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
2d ago
Both those things were motivated by angry Palestinian refugees wanting to fight Israel while their host countries weren't so keen.
And by "refugees" you mean "guerillas". Indeed, most countries do not want you to use their territory as a staging area for antagonizing the neighbors and will tell you to cut that shit out. I fail to see how this is exculpatory for the Palestinians.
One reason this whole situation is such a mess is that King Abdullah annexed the West Bank which was supposed to be the core of the new Palestinian state, which also happened to make Palestinians a majority of the Jordanian population. Obviously the Palestinians were more keen on attacking Israel than Jordan, especially post-67.
I don't see what the Jordanian occupation has to do with explaining why the Palestinians couldn't get along with the Jordanians. The Jordanian civil war took place after Israel annexed the West Bank.
As for Lebanon, Israel set up a false flag terror group attempting to provoke the PLO into war during a ceasefire. They also attempted to assassinate the American ambassador to Lebanon.
The PLO was involved in the Lebanese civil war since 1975. Why are you bringing up events from the 80s? My point isn't that "Israel does no wrong", my point is that the Palestinians will pick a fight with anyone and everyone. Whataboutist arguments about Israel have nothing at all to do with this.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
2d ago
Uh, do you remember what happened when Jordan had a conflict with Palestinians? And then that time Lebanon had a conflict with Palestinians? It's remarkably ahistorical to think that the Palestinians just want to be left alone and it's just that they can't get along with those Israelis.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
3d ago
Past experience? The more parties you delegate enforcement to the more parties whose interests can clash.
You have four or five nations managing this stuff and you risk just being back in the great power era where people protected their own trade and spheres of influence.
There's a different party on each end of the trade. The route between those parties being protected benefits both and hurts nobody.
Also, a lot of nations simply aren't as good at this right now due to delegating it to America. It's not Somali pirates you need to worry about but state-sponsored groups like the Houthis, and their sponsors themselves if they decide to pull a Saddam.
Indeed, but that's hardly insurmountable with a bit of will and training.
But I must repeat again that military spending is not the elephant in the room.
We live in an incomparably more connected time and much smaller falls can lead to large changes in our standard of living.
Agree. But I don't agree that reduced trade or living standards means the "end of globalism".
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
3d ago
Why is a bendy banana subpar?
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
3d ago
Whether that was smart or not, historians will debate, but we were never going to keep this going much longer, certainly not beyond 2035. Fundamentally, because the U.S. government is insolvent. It burns through $10 billion a day it doesn’t have, backed by the money printer, which funds the military, which enforces global security, which props up the dollar, which keeps the money printer running.
This makes no sense to me. Why does globalism depend on the solvency of the USG? Because the US is responsible for keeping piracy on the high seas to an absolute minimum and that's not affordable? Why can't some of that responsibility be delegated to other countries? Of course, this is missing the point entirely, because the military is only the third biggest line item on the federal budget. The US is more likely to be bankrupted by boomers retiring than mowing the lawn off the coast of Somalia.
Global trade has existed for thousands of years. Spices and silk have been imported by the west since time immemorial. We're just haggling about the level.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
5d ago
I knew a guy in high school who was totally in the tank for SJC and he was totally pro-reading the Greeks about science, although I could never get him to explain why.
In particular, I am amazed by the inclusion of a lot of original science publications. Sure, they are interesting from a history of science point of view, but very likely they are not the easiest avenue to understand a physical concept.
It is actually even worse. Reading Euclid's Elements won't expose you to anything that's wrong but it's probably much easier to learn geometry from khan academy these days.
But when it comes to science, the Greeks were basically just completely wrong about nearly everything.
From The Generation of Animals:
Again, more males are born if copulation takes place when north than when south winds are blowing; for animals' bodies are more liquid when the wind is in the south, so that they produce more residue – and more residue is harder to concoct; hence the semen of the males is more liquid and so is the discharge of the menstrual fluids in women
Huh? He goes on like this for 120 pages. How is this worth anyone's time in Anno Domini 2025? It seems it must be an in-group signalling exercise among liberal arts respecters - poseurs aren't going to bother reading all that.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
5d ago
The growth in real median household income is, to my understanding, driven by more women entering the full-time workforce and the growth of highly-paid white collar service work (which the median woman is more suited to and which AI has a good chance to cannibalize soon)
Maybe you could tell this story before the pandemic, but the pandemic and the aftermath have boosted male median wages too.
which doesn't benefit you one bit if you're a working class male who can't attract a white-collar partner.
It clearly benefits the median American household, so either the median American household has a white collar woman or it's not just white collar woman whose wages are going up.
Really, "prosperity" to most people means access to zero-sum things such as land in desirable areas, social status and the labor of other people. Access to those things has absolutely gone down for the median American worker in a world where wealth inequality keeps increasing and where other countries have become much wealthier relative to America, and where worst of all they keep getting blasted by social media about other people having it better than them 24/7.
This is just by definition wrong to some extent, right? To the extent that status is determined by wealth, it isn't affected by wealth inequality. Elon is wealthier/higher status than me and would be if he was worth merely a hundred million rather than a hundred billion. The top 1% are going to buy the 1% most desirable real estate and the median American by definition cannot. Etc.
What has changed here with respect to real estate is that the number of 1%ers has increased in pace with the population. There's 50% more people in the country than there were in 1980 and the California coastline hasn't grown a bit. That means that the median American is living in a less desirable, in absolute terms, than the median American in 1980.
As far as buying others' labor, consumer goods have never been cheaper. Automation has made big strides and there's still countries with much lower wages than the US. Where this has become a problem is with domestic service industries like education, medicine, the trades, etc. but this may be partially an unavoidable effect of the productivity growth that drove down prices in other sectors.
all of that is just eaten up by the hedonic treadmill and they're still miserable because they're at the bottom of the totem pole and see no way up.
The hedonic treadmill cuts both ways, the things that people think were so great about the imagined past were not considered so great by those living in the actual past. Being at the bottom of the totem pole sucks no matter what year it is.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
6d ago
Real incomes have been down for a generation for the average American worker
They're not.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
6d ago
his children’s formal educational opportunities.
Not even this. You might have to switch school districts because you lost your house, but universities offer scholarships. Harvard is 100% free including room and board to students from families earning under $100k (and has lesser benefits for other income bands).
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
8d ago
New (to you) music thread?
I recently came across this choon:
It's kind of a Marty Robbins x New Order sound. Surprisingly catchy.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
8d ago
manufacturing, which is real positive-sum activity.
Unless it's iPhones being manufactured, presumably?
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
8d ago
The bad thing about slavery isn't that they did it for free. In fact, they didn't even do it for free, they got room and board.
The bad thing about slavery was that they (or their ancestors) were forcibly abducted, transported (across state lines!), and put to work at gunpoint, with their children being born into the same situation. Illegal immigrants can leave at any moment and their kids cives Americani sunt.
It sucks that there are people born every day into poverty in third world countries. However, people who illegally (often perilously)come to this country for opportunities they don't have at home obviously will not benefit from being sent home. They know what home is like and they made the decision to come here anyway. We can talk about whether they are good for the country, but the argument that illegal immigration is bad for the illegal immigrants just doesn't hold water.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
9d ago
We could get rid of migrant farm labor by subsidizing/tariff-exempting cheap automated farming equipment from China.
Could we? We're not reaping grain by hand these days. My understanding is that farm labor mostly goes towards harvesting fruits and vegetables and that this largely has not been automated anywhere because it's really hard. I'd be surprised if it's been economically automated in China where labor cost is much lower. I'm sure they have prototype robots, but do they have any in actual use?
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
9d ago
as territories, Australian business could just "incorporate" in Heard or McDonald, and completely bypass the tariffs levied against Australia, were this not done.
Is this actually true? It's not obvious to me that it is. Presumably American businesses are not able to incorporate in, for example, Midway Atoll or Baker Island, even though these are nominally American territories.
The alternative theory is that whoever drew up this table looked at bogus data that listed millions of dollars of machinery imported from that uninhabited icebox. That seems more likely to me.
according to export data from the World Bank, the US imported US$1.4m (A$2.23m) of products from Heard Island and McDonald Islands in 2022, nearly all of which was “machinery and electrical” imports.
The second season generally seems to be pretty aimless. People do stuff without any obvious motive, there's so much secrecy and mystery but I get the feeling that it's a kind of potemkin village of a plot where there's nothing actually behind any of those secrets.
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