So you believe we should just blindly trust that the government always follows and enforces the law correctly and even handedly?
The US refuses about 2.7 million visitor visas out of a total of 9 million visitor visas. The B-visa refusal rate for Afghanistan was 74% under Obama (for comparisons, it was 4% for UAE and 5% for Switzerland, so not a Muslim issue). Meeting the evidence and documentation requirements for US visas is not easy, take it from someone who has gone through it many times. It is in no way surprising or unusual that a few adults and a bunch of kids from Afghanistan would be refused visitors visas to the US. Having a passport from Afghanistan absolutely sucks. Welcome to the real world.
When there is obvious reason for their action and explanation offered we have every right to question those actions.
You most certainly have a right to make yourself look like an ignorant, partisan bigot, which is what you're doing.
Until now, Google and Facebook -- which have been staunch supporters of net neutrality in the past -- have stayed out of the debate
Google and Facebook's business models depend on being able to push large amounts of ads and media at people who don't want that commercial content. With net neutrality, it's end users that pay for that delivery. Without net neutrality, ISPs would start charging them extra for the content that makes money for them (their ads) while delivering the content customers actually want without extra charges.
So, don't kid yourself that Google and Facebook are doing this for your benefit; they are doing it because their primary business model, namely pushing ads on you, depends on it.
They are accused of those things, not found guilty.
So? There are many forms of professional and political misconduct that are not technically illegal but that people find rightfully objectionable. That's true for CNN's journalistic misconduct as much as it is for Silicon Valley VCs proposing sex to female employees or Hillary Clinton lying about her E-mail or her husband's sexual affairs.
Because the NYT alleges that Trump might use his power to influence approval of a merger, you accuse him of "open abuse" of presidential powers? He hasn't done anything yet. And if he opposes the merger, it's likely for the same reasons Democrats would oppose such mergers, namely too much media concentration.
Furthermore, even if he were to try to penalize CNN, it would be the kind of action Clinton heartily approved of, namely executive power to ensure what the executive branch considered "truth", she just wanted to be the one at the levers of power.
Natural monopolies are created by high barriers to entry. The need to buy expensive infrastructure to enter the market is a barrier to entry.
There's zero evidence for that.
How many power lines, internet connectivity lines, phone lines, water pipes, sewer pipes, cable TV lines, and gas pipes do you think I should have going into my property?
The labor is more valuable because it's more productive, but that increased productivity per worker is incompatible with full employment if consumption doesn't grow 1:1 with it
"Full employment" is a concept related to unemployment rate, a short term, politically motivated measure. It has no long term economic meaning. By historical standards, we are actually far beyond "full employment" today.
Peak consumption due to natural resource limits presents a problem.
There is no evidence for that either. It's certainly not reflected either by labor costs or commodities prices.
the reason for your trip is for pleasure (or else medical treatment) you plan to stay in the U.S. for only a specific, limited period you have sufficient funds to cover your expenses while visiting the U.S. (particularly important because if you run out of money, the authorities assume you might violate your visa by working in the U.S.) you have compelling social and economic ties in your home country, such as a job or schooling and family, and you have a house, apartment, or other residence outside the U.S. as well as other binding ties that will ensure your return when your permitted stay is over.
You don't like it or don't like the rationale behind it? Tough shit, take it up with politicians. I'm just explaining the thinking to you since you seem utterly ignorant of how this stuff work. But, personally, I think these rules make a lot of sense. They are pretty much the same rules most civilized countries use.
If they are refugees then sorry but the law does not say anything of the kind - a refugee by international law needs no VISA, needs not passport, and cannot be legally turned away by any country. America is a signatory to that law, and bound by it.
Refugee status is something these girls would have to apply for from Afghanistan and would have to get granted before travel to the US. Since they haven't applied for it, they can't travel as refugees. Once they apply for refugee status, they can't travel as visitors anymore.
If they came to the US under a visitor visa and then applied for refugee status, it would be harder to remove them, regardless of whether their application is ultimately granted or not. To avoid this situation, countries avoid admitting people likely to seek asylum in the first place.
Many European countries have private health insurers
Who compete with high quality government-funded medical care, so in order to make a profit - they have to actually offer really good value.
You're mixing up health insurers and health care providers. Under universal healthcare, both can be private (Germany, Switzerland), both can be public (UK, France), or you can have public insurance with private providers (Canada).
The US has all three models, for different populations. All of them perform poorly in the US, but the publicly insured models are far worse than the privately insured ones.
Why can't the smart, educated, independent-minded people decide for themselves in which country they'd prefer to live?
They can! Everybody has a right to emigrate from their country. However, nobody has a right to immigrate into any country they choose.
Why do they have to sacrifice their well-being, and quite possibly their lives, to improve the Afghan society, just because they had the bad luck of getting born there?
I'm not passing judgment on this either way, I'm just pointing out that there are downsides to luring away all the smart people from a foreign country.
Clearly you're not spaking for many of the conservtives here.
I am not "speaking for" anybody. But my characterization of political conservatism in the US is correct: it favors equality under the law for men and women, but rejects policies that bring about equality of outcome. US Conservatives believe that equality of opportunity absent other kinds of policy will return society to a predominance of traditional gender roles. Actually, US progressives and "liberals" believe that as well, they just want to counteract it.
And now you've yet again reached the "inventing random shit" stage of your argument. In fairness it took you marginally longer than usual.
Are you serious? The notion that "progressives and socialists want to impose equality of outcome" is a surprise to you? Perhaps the reason that so many simple facts seem like "random shit" to you is an expression of how limited your knowledge about the world is.
Hmmm, so the ACS organization that reviews academic papers claims to own them and charges through the nose to access a copy.
They don't "claim to own them", they actually own them. Specifically, they own the copyright, because the authors have transferred the copyright to them.
The days of expensive limited print runs are over with electronic versions of documents. Culture shock anyone?
They probably are. But SciHub isn't the way it's going to end, Arxiv is.
Do you have some reason to expect that to be the case ? Because it's a pretty extraordinary claim, which means it needs extraordinary evidence.
If admitted as refugees, these girls would clearly be eligible for decades of government services in education and healthcare alone, in addition to the infrastructure and other public goods they consume. If you want to admit them, the burden of proof is on you that they don't impose a net cost on American taxpayer. That's not just my opinion, that's actually the law. They probably couldn't do that, which is probably why they didn't get admitted.
Now, as to your specific points:
That's odd, because statistically immigrants
The population of "immigrants" isn't the same as "girls from Afghanistan seeking asylum".
create about four jobs for every one job they take
Statistical job creation is a meaningless metric of contribution to society.
pay taxes and
If legally admitted, they wouldn't be paying any taxes for a decade, until their education is complete. After that, there is a good chance that they will get married and have children. Their parents also never paid into the system.
Start with an obvious one--why do they need the last four digits of my SSN?
They already have your entire SSN; they don't need to get that from the state.
What they want to check is whether the state's records are accurate, i.e., whether someone just made up a SSN. To do that, they compare the SSN they already have for you against the data provided by the states.
We'd enforce our immigration laws strictly and kick out illegal immigrants, instead of harboring 10-20 million illegals and dreaming up new ways to let them stay.
We'd give strong preference to immigrants and workers with high skills, instead of having a race- and family based immigration system.
We'd cut the Medicare/Medicaid budget in half, or alternatively, cover all Americans on the current Medicare/Medicaid budget.
Sending sensitive, private financial information to CFPB? EPIC is A-OK with that!
Sending sensitive, private medical information to the Federal Data Services Hub under ACA? EPIC is A-OK with that too!
Collecting minimal voter information that's already mostly public to see whether there might be a problem with illegal voting? EPIC can't allow that!
It seems to me like EPIC is more driven by political partisanship than by a consistent concern for protecting the privacy of Americans from federal overreach.
I was talking about private markets in rights-of-way.
But since you bring it up...
If it's every piece of land is owned by somebody and all rights-of-way must be negotiated, nothing will get done. That's why we have public property.
I've lived most of my life on private roads; things actually generally happen a lot faster and more efficiently with private ownership of infrastructure. Nor have they ever created any monopolies.
Time to tax billionaires out of existence, clearly as parasites they are no longer sustainable.
You are engaging in a bait-and-switch. You demonize billionaires, but taxing billionaires can't feed the welfare state, there simply isn't enough money there. The people progressives and the left are actually are proposing to "tax out of existence" are professionals: entrepreneurs, small business owners, doctors, lawyers, engineers, accountants, people who have worked hard for a lifetime to accumulate the skills necessary to make a few times median wage.
Those who consumer the most resources and generate the most pollution should be reviled upon a planet with limited resources
Your goals and policies are again inconsistent. If you are concerned about too much consumption and too much pollution, the last thing you want to do is to transfer money from high earners to low earners via taxes or a UBI, because that is a classic way of increasing consumption; that's the whole point of such Keynesian policies.
Hunter gatherer societies are pretty egalitarian, which means not much by the way of subjugtion. Which is what the GGP was talking about.
The GGP falsely implied that sexual division of labor implies subjugation.
But before risking actual money, I suggest you start with the wikipedia pages on hunter gatherer societies and the references therein.
I suggest you take your own advice. What you will find is that hunter-gatherer societies are egalitarian, yet have strong sexual division of labor as a cultural norm. Translated into a modern context, that means that men and women have equal rights under the law, yet end up dominating different parts of society. Conservatives and libertarians don't have a problem with that. It is progressives and socialists that want to impose equality of outcome, instead of simply accepting that egalitarianism usually goes along with different outcomes for men and women. Egalitarianism and equality of outcome are inherently incompatible.
I'm dependent on the government for my safety when driving a car, clean water, fire and police protection, military protection against terrorist states, pure food and drugs, financial predators...
No, you are not. If you think you are, you are a gullible fool.
Slashdot Mirror
The US refuses about 2.7 million visitor visas out of a total of 9 million visitor visas. The B-visa refusal rate for Afghanistan was 74% under Obama (for comparisons, it was 4% for UAE and 5% for Switzerland, so not a Muslim issue). Meeting the evidence and documentation requirements for US visas is not easy, take it from someone who has gone through it many times. It is in no way surprising or unusual that a few adults and a bunch of kids from Afghanistan would be refused visitors visas to the US. Having a passport from Afghanistan absolutely sucks. Welcome to the real world.
You most certainly have a right to make yourself look like an ignorant, partisan bigot, which is what you're doing.
Google and Facebook's business models depend on being able to push large amounts of ads and media at people who don't want that commercial content. With net neutrality, it's end users that pay for that delivery. Without net neutrality, ISPs would start charging them extra for the content that makes money for them (their ads) while delivering the content customers actually want without extra charges.
So, don't kid yourself that Google and Facebook are doing this for your benefit; they are doing it because their primary business model, namely pushing ads on you, depends on it.
So? There are many forms of professional and political misconduct that are not technically illegal but that people find rightfully objectionable. That's true for CNN's journalistic misconduct as much as it is for Silicon Valley VCs proposing sex to female employees or Hillary Clinton lying about her E-mail or her husband's sexual affairs.
Because the NYT alleges that Trump might use his power to influence approval of a merger, you accuse him of "open abuse" of presidential powers? He hasn't done anything yet. And if he opposes the merger, it's likely for the same reasons Democrats would oppose such mergers, namely too much media concentration.
Furthermore, even if he were to try to penalize CNN, it would be the kind of action Clinton heartily approved of, namely executive power to ensure what the executive branch considered "truth", she just wanted to be the one at the levers of power.
Great. Then you don't have any reason to object to their exclusion from the US.
Well, you can't "see it" because you haven't seen the application, and hence you have no idea what evidence they did or didn't provide.
There's zero evidence for that.
As many or as few as you want to.
You're just utterly stuck in the misconception that "private ownership" means "individual ownership by Scrooge McDuck".
"Full employment" is a concept related to unemployment rate, a short term, politically motivated measure. It has no long term economic meaning. By historical standards, we are actually far beyond "full employment" today.
There is no evidence for that either. It's certainly not reflected either by labor costs or commodities prices.
Because you're ignorant? I have simply been trying to explain to you the rationale behind existing US law.
Existing US law requires that in order to enter the US as a visitor, you provide evidence that:
You don't like it or don't like the rationale behind it? Tough shit, take it up with politicians. I'm just explaining the thinking to you since you seem utterly ignorant of how this stuff work. But, personally, I think these rules make a lot of sense. They are pretty much the same rules most civilized countries use.
Refugee status is something these girls would have to apply for from Afghanistan and would have to get granted before travel to the US. Since they haven't applied for it, they can't travel as refugees. Once they apply for refugee status, they can't travel as visitors anymore.
If they came to the US under a visitor visa and then applied for refugee status, it would be harder to remove them, regardless of whether their application is ultimately granted or not. To avoid this situation, countries avoid admitting people likely to seek asylum in the first place.
You're mixing up health insurers and health care providers. Under universal healthcare, both can be private (Germany, Switzerland), both can be public (UK, France), or you can have public insurance with private providers (Canada).
The US has all three models, for different populations. All of them perform poorly in the US, but the publicly insured models are far worse than the privately insured ones.
They can! Everybody has a right to emigrate from their country. However, nobody has a right to immigrate into any country they choose.
I'm not passing judgment on this either way, I'm just pointing out that there are downsides to luring away all the smart people from a foreign country.
I am not "speaking for" anybody. But my characterization of political conservatism in the US is correct: it favors equality under the law for men and women, but rejects policies that bring about equality of outcome. US Conservatives believe that equality of opportunity absent other kinds of policy will return society to a predominance of traditional gender roles. Actually, US progressives and "liberals" believe that as well, they just want to counteract it.
Are you serious? The notion that "progressives and socialists want to impose equality of outcome" is a surprise to you? Perhaps the reason that so many simple facts seem like "random shit" to you is an expression of how limited your knowledge about the world is.
They don't "claim to own them", they actually own them. Specifically, they own the copyright, because the authors have transferred the copyright to them.
They probably are. But SciHub isn't the way it's going to end, Arxiv is.
If admitted as refugees, these girls would clearly be eligible for decades of government services in education and healthcare alone, in addition to the infrastructure and other public goods they consume. If you want to admit them, the burden of proof is on you that they don't impose a net cost on American taxpayer. That's not just my opinion, that's actually the law. They probably couldn't do that, which is probably why they didn't get admitted.
Now, as to your specific points:
The population of "immigrants" isn't the same as "girls from Afghanistan seeking asylum".
Statistical job creation is a meaningless metric of contribution to society.
If legally admitted, they wouldn't be paying any taxes for a decade, until their education is complete. After that, there is a good chance that they will get married and have children. Their parents also never paid into the system.
Absolutely false.
And that has to do with EPIC's lawsuit or the hypocrisy of their position on privacy... exactly nothing.
They already have your entire SSN; they don't need to get that from the state.
What they want to check is whether the state's records are accurate, i.e., whether someone just made up a SSN. To do that, they compare the SSN they already have for you against the data provided by the states.
We'd enforce our immigration laws strictly and kick out illegal immigrants, instead of harboring 10-20 million illegals and dreaming up new ways to let them stay.
We'd give strong preference to immigrants and workers with high skills, instead of having a race- and family based immigration system.
We'd cut the Medicare/Medicaid budget in half, or alternatively, cover all Americans on the current Medicare/Medicaid budget.
How about it?
You're saying that California is refusing to hand over voter registration data in order to protect Trump's fragile ego? That doesn't make sense.
Sending sensitive, private financial information to CFPB? EPIC is A-OK with that!
Sending sensitive, private medical information to the Federal Data Services Hub under ACA? EPIC is A-OK with that too!
Collecting minimal voter information that's already mostly public to see whether there might be a problem with illegal voting? EPIC can't allow that!
It seems to me like EPIC is more driven by political partisanship than by a consistent concern for protecting the privacy of Americans from federal overreach.
I was talking about private markets in rights-of-way.
But since you bring it up...
I've lived most of my life on private roads; things actually generally happen a lot faster and more efficiently with private ownership of infrastructure. Nor have they ever created any monopolies.
Ah, I see, proof by vigorous assertion!
You are engaging in a bait-and-switch. You demonize billionaires, but taxing billionaires can't feed the welfare state, there simply isn't enough money there. The people progressives and the left are actually are proposing to "tax out of existence" are professionals: entrepreneurs, small business owners, doctors, lawyers, engineers, accountants, people who have worked hard for a lifetime to accumulate the skills necessary to make a few times median wage.
Your goals and policies are again inconsistent. If you are concerned about too much consumption and too much pollution, the last thing you want to do is to transfer money from high earners to low earners via taxes or a UBI, because that is a classic way of increasing consumption; that's the whole point of such Keynesian policies.
The GGP falsely implied that sexual division of labor implies subjugation.
I suggest you take your own advice. What you will find is that hunter-gatherer societies are egalitarian, yet have strong sexual division of labor as a cultural norm. Translated into a modern context, that means that men and women have equal rights under the law, yet end up dominating different parts of society. Conservatives and libertarians don't have a problem with that. It is progressives and socialists that want to impose equality of outcome, instead of simply accepting that egalitarianism usually goes along with different outcomes for men and women. Egalitarianism and equality of outcome are inherently incompatible.
No, you are not. If you think you are, you are a gullible fool.