And medical malpractice kills 250,000 people per year in the US. Although gun control advocates like to make the public health argument, it isn't about public health, it's about societal control and the elites being concerned about not having a monopoly of force. It's a lot harder to shove your agenda down the unwilling throats of the little people when they can fight back.
To imply that Ebay is responsible in anyway for Cho's deranged killing spree is dishonest and contemptible. It's not like Ebay or Paypal are firearm friendly to begin with.
What exactly is wrong with the iconic "ape to man progression"?
Many people view chimps and other apes as our less evolved cousins, when, speaking from an evolutionary point of view, they are every bit as evolved as us, they just happen to have evolved in different directions.
Btw, I am mentioning this despite being more on the side of those favoring tighter gun controls. There were 1,225 lethal gun accidents in 1995 (http://www.hpjc.org/issues_guncontrol.html)
6 people drown in swimming pools in the United States every year. Accidental drowning is the 4th leading cause of accidental death in the United States (AHEAD of accidental gunshot wounds). Source: http://www.poolalarms.com/pool_drowning_statistics .htm
Funny thing is, you don't see a well funded, politically smooth campaign to ban swimming pools, and constant media coverage every time there is a swimming pool incident, do you? This, despite the fact that a child is more likely to die due to a pool than a gun.
Gun control is nothing more than an attempt by the elites to acquire a permanent monopoly on the use of force relegating the citizens of this country to mere subjects more fit to be ruled than led or represented. All this is done under the guise of "public safety", but as just the brief example of the pools highlights, there are better, more appropriate vehicles for improving public safety if that was the intent. Virginia Tech wasn't made safer by being "Gun Free". For the 60 or 70 people shot, it was made much more unsafe because they were denied the one weapon that might've made a difference. And the gun banners reflexive instinct is to make everyone even more defenseless and dependent on authorities, who have done such a bang up job in these spree killings that, Utah excepting, not one single killer has been stopped by the police and instead stopped killing when they got tired of killing. Color me unimpressed.
There is no language requierment for legal imigration. The tighter system I refer to prety much screws over the people you want to imigrate to the US in favor of those you don't.
It goes like this. 1/7th of all legal immigrants into the US are Mexican. 1/2 of all illegal immigrants are Mexican. Illegal immigration outnumbers legal immigration by anywhere from 4x to 10x. Ipso facto, that guy at Taco Bell who doesn't speak English very well? Well, chances are good he's illegal. Not guaranteed of course, but pretty damn good. Various bodies have published estimates that anywhere from 25% to 75% of job growth in American over the past 4 years has gone to illegal aliens.
I.e A set number of skilled workers and an unlimited number of "family immigrants". That means Abdul has a Masters in Computer Science it is MORE difficult for him to immigrate than for his illiterate sister who marries an American janitor. As if that isn't bad enough the waiting list for her to file for the elderly parents is
Hey, I'm pro immigration on aggregate. However, I think we should have entrance criteria and the best entrance criteria, as you pointed out, should NOT be that you happen to have a relative already here.
PS: Ask Burger King (or any other US corporation) what penalties they face for employing an illegal alien.
Penalties have to be enforced to be effective. Under the Bush administration, Federal prosecutions for the hiring of illegals has almost vanished. At one point a couple of years ago, there had been *1* prosecution, total, compared to hundreds per year under Clinton. A few cases have very recently made the news, they are altogether the more remarkable because of the startling absence of any prosecutions over the last few years.
I agree. A few notes.
7. Immigration will eventually change everything about this country. (you seem to imply this is bad. I don't).
Not all change is bad, not all change is good. But I'm not a big fan of a false bill of goods, and that is, historically at least, what immigration proponents have sold. A good example is Edward Kennedy's comments on the 1965 Immigration Act. The bottom line is, in my opinion, if we're voting on something, or the government is "giving" us something, we need to know exactly what it is. A lot of the "fear mongering" out there is simply a counter to all the happiness and sunshine propoganda out there on illegal immigration. Illegal immigration, as a movement, is well financed and coordinated, with teams of lawyers in place to file injuctions and lawsuits at the first whiff of anti-illegal legislation or action. The anti-illegal immigration movement, as a whole, is a lot newer and less organized. Which is ironic considering the majority of Americans (and legal immigrants I might add) are very anti-illegal immigration. Why is something that most Americans don't want being forced down our throat?
I disagree that we can simply remove the social net from beneath them. These people need health care from time to time. Their only option is an emergency room or death. In most cases, they probably wait until their situation gets so bad that they must the emergency room. This is a shame. Many illnesses and diseases could be treated by a lower cost primary care physician, if they have access too it. Maybe this new idea of having low cost primary care doctors working in places like Walmart or Target is a good idea. (They plan to charge $40 for a 15 minute consultation).
I agree you can't simply remove it, but a weening process needs to take place. Hospitals are literally going out of business because on the one hand, they can't refuse service, but don't get reimbursed by the illegal alien patients who vanish when it comes time to pay the bill. And now the Federal government, in many cases, isn't reimbursing hospitals for the cost of treating these people, despite the fact that it's the Federal government that says they have to treat them. This is just one of many problems that need to be addressed.
When you talk about removing the net from beneath them, I get this image of a woman about to give birth, or a man just hit by a car waiting outside an ER. Then the admissions nurse refuses to let them in because they are undocumented. I just can't see them being that cruel. It's not ethical, inhumane, and doesn't fit with the American value system.
Emotional reasoning tends to make really bad legislation. People can heave hearts, bureaucracies never do.
This represents a deap misonderstanding of what imigration dose to nations. Here is how it work,
Step 1: Workers leave == Country gets poorer.
Step 2. Workers come in == Country gets richer.
Uh, no, this isn't how it works. Workers flow towards prosperity, they don't necessarily create it. For example, the Yugoslav exodus hasn't exactly created booming economies in the countries where they immigrated to.
That is one of the reasons that the USA got to be a Superpower.
The USA became a super power for a whole lot of reasons, none of them having anything at all to do with illegal immigration. And, as a matter of fact, in the two decades prior to WW2 and the two decades after, through post-war boom, the US had a very restrictive immigration policy.
Now that you are tightening up immigration and reducing the number of legal immigrants. Then structuring systems to keep illegal immigrants out of the formal system (illegal aliens can't even work at Burger King, but can peddle, sex and drugs like anybody else)
Guess you haven't been to Burger King lately? Or Taco Bell, or any other fast food join. Where I live, the workers are almost all illegals, judging by their lack of mastery of the English language. For a group of folks denied entry to the formal system, they sure are working for quite a few corporations.
The US is on it's way down realetive to the rest of the world and I am frightened by what may happen when you loose economic dominance while still retaining Military dominance.
No country in the world accepts more immigrants per year than the United States, both illegal and legal. So, in other words, you're pretty much wrong on every single point you tried to make in your post, although you did manage to put in some nice leftist pablum.
So, lets clarify something. I don't hold a grudge against the average immigrant, illegal or otherwise. Given the same situation as them, I might do exactly the same thing. The other day I read a story about a high school teacher in Mexico who, after teaching school, went on to do a full shift of odd jobs, all in order to make $12,000 a year. On the other hand, if he were to cross the border and work illegally in the US, he could make around $24,000 - $26,000 as a carpenter working only 8 hours or so a day. It doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure out the rational choice in that situation, and very little of the "fault" falls on the individual.
That being said, the way the current structure is configured, the incentives are entirely geared to rewarding illegal immigration. First, the jobs are here. Secondly, unlike in Mexico, they can get free medical care here, regardless of documentation or ability to pay. Third, once they get dependents (aka anchor babies), they are eligible for the full gamut of social welfare assistance. It's a really good deal for a poor, uneducated person.
My solution is simple. First, go after the companies, corporations and individuals that hire illegal aliens with fines and jail sentences. Remove their ability to claim an illegal alien as a deductible salary expense. Secondly, remove the social welfare net from under illegals. You're here legally, you still get it. You're here illegally, you don't. Probably not practical in the short run, but something needs to be done to prevent illegals from using hospital emergency rooms as their primary care providers (among other things).
Giving legal status may cost us something --- forgiving some back taxes on $3 an hour wages.
FYI, most illegals are paid far better than $3 hr. Typically they are paid what an American citizen would make for that line of work, with the caveat that their presence in the work force en masse has lowered the overall wage for those types of work.
As for enrolling in courses legally, and working towards jobs with benefits, honestly, more power to them. The demographic trend, however, is not very promising. 1st generation American born to illegal parents actually do worse than their parents. They get the lazy American work ethic instead of the immigrant work ethic, combined with the immigrant education (there are exceptions to this, of course, but the overall Latin attitude towards education is mostly negative).
Seriously: Do you really think increasing enforcement or penalties will really help the situation? In my opinion we are pushing illegals into a corner in which some of them think that illegal (felony level, i mean) activity is a good option. There has to be some compromise here.
The short answer is: yes, I do think it will help. It won't eliminate the problem, but the problem is one of mass and numbers. We can't continue to import 10 million illegal, poor, uneducated immigrants per year without serious social consequences. To the AC who asked "what gives us the right to decide who can come and who can't", well, we do. This is, at a certain level, a zero sum game. There are over 6 billion people in the planet, the majority of them poor. A lot of them would love to come to the US...far more than the US could hold and still be the country that makes immigrants want to come to it or a country that Americans would recognize. A balance has to be struck. And it isn't.
This is why I use the term "fear-mongering". I bring up illegal aliens adding value to the economy. You bring up murders and jailed statistics.
Only an idiot thinks bringing up facts in a debate is "fear mongering". The bottom line is, you cannot assess the "positive" economic impact of illegal immigration because much of the impact goes into the grey or black market where statistics are hard to come by. However, you can assess the negative economic impact fairly easily...at least, where statistics are kept. In a debate about the merits of illegal immigration, bringing up the negative impact of illegal immigration isn't "fear mongering", it's "staying on topic".
You have this image of scheming Mexicans sitting across the border loading their guns and sharpening their knives thinking of ways to kill Americans! yeah!
Hmm...it's safe to say you have no idea what I think. Hint: my fiance is a 2nd generation Mexican-American.
There may be some of these people. They are probably part of the illegal drug trade.
And what you probably are ignorant of is the fact that the people involved in the illegal drug trade are the same people involved in the illegal people trafficking trade.
This should not be confused with the majority of these people. Most of them live in poverty.
Most of them live in poverty because the average education level of illegal immigrants coming from Mexico, Central America, and South America is around the 8th grade. They come over poor, and those that stay remain poor. They form homogenous communities where poverty is entrenched and spans generations. You may like the idea of being able to hire a cheap nanny or pay an "undocumented worker" substandard wages to mow your lawn, but personally, I find the whole regime to be oppressive.
They see the wealth of the US, and decide they should go there, despite the risks, and get a job. This way they can earn a meager living and send their kids through American schools so that they can grow up to have good productive lives. The long term payoff is positive.
You must be a stockholder for Tyson, or Walmart. I challenge you to provide any meaningful statistics that demonstrate a long term positive payoff from massive levels of illegal immigration.
Is America only meant for Decedents of white Europeans? Is that the bottom line of your argument?
Besides logic, reading comprehension doesn't seem to be your forte. My argument is that illegal immigration, especially of the numbers and character of the illegal immigrants (education level, criminality level), is a net negative. Once you factor in the impact to Social Security and Medicaid, which are already doomed to insolvency, the problem becomes even more acute given the burden that illegals place on those systems. Legitimizing them will accelerate the problem, btw.
Why can't we give the hard-working, law-abiding, family-values type illegal alian legal work status?
Wow, you are a dunce. They aren't law-abiding if they come over illegally, steal someone else's social security number and commit identity fraud. Now, they may not be on the level of rapists and murderers, but hey, there's plenty of them coming over too. It's the gift that keeps on giving.
Who cares if we forgive some of their unpaid taxes
All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others. If you don't see the flaw in this, you are beyond hope.
so we don't have to pay for so much enforcement.
You don't even know how much we pay for enforcement, but hint: it's a lot less than we pay on jailing and treating them in hospitals.
That's exactly what parasite-host relationships are. Evolution isn't so much a march in a straight line, but a vicious cycle of decimation-immunization-regression to naivete-back to decimation, ie, the Red Queen hypothesis. The really interesting thing is the degree to which parasites have affected evolution. A lot of secondary sex characteristics, because of their biological expense, are really good indicators of parasite resistance.
Every time I hear an argument like this I get frustrated. People always say things based on dubious math calculated by fear-mongering conservatives like "immigrants cost $10k/per year". However, they never stop to consider that migrant workers might actually ADD VALUE to the economic system. How much money to Americans save every year on food because of low-cost migrant labor? How about other services? I imagine that it more than offsets the dubious number of $10k/year in government services (if that's even correct).
There are few *tiny* flaws in your thinking.
One, "fear-mongering conservatives [sic]" rarely talk about the cost of "immigrants". The talk about the cost of illegal aliens. There is the economic cost, which can be quantified, and the social cost and is hard to define, but like porn, a lot of people know it when they see it.
So where does the economic cost of illegal aliens come from? Well, the obvious costs are incarceration costs. The US has approximately 2,000,000 people behind bars, and 1/3rd of them are illegal aliens. The average annual cost is $22650 per prisoner, which means we are spending over $1.5 billion per year on simply locking up illegal aliens for committing a pretty diverse set of crimes. Approximately 30-40% of illegal aliens are on some form of public assistance. Tack in the anchor babies that are considered citizens, but are otherwise economic drains (medical, social, and education expense), and it's clear our little experimentation with an illegal alien invasion (an estimated 4 to 10 million cross the border every year according to the Border Patrol, as referenced in House.gov document) is a net economic drain under the most optimistic models.
So how about the social cost? How many people are murdered by illegal aliens every year? DOJ doesn't really track it, but estimates are around 4,000 people. That's 4,000 people that, almost certainly, would be alive if not for those "undocumented immigrants" that you "liberals" love so much. And those murders are in addition to the rapes, assaults, DWIs (with injuries and fatalities), and property crime that, as a population group, illegal aliens are much more likely to commit than native Americans or legal immigrants. Oh, another social cost never remarked is the wage depression effect of illegal immigration, especially for blue collar jobs, and PARTICULARLY, this impact on other minority communities like African-Americans. But it's not limited to just them, either. Blue collar Americans of every stripe have seen their wages decline across the board, pretty much in-line with the massive increase in illegal immigration. Fast food used to the an entry level job for high school kids. It's now a bastion for illegal aliens. Same thing with lawn care, construction, handy-man work, road-work, meat-packing, brick-laying, etc. Guess what, not everyone gets to be a software engineer or doctor, and a just society would make pains to give it's citizens and legal immigrants the first shot at the jobs that are left, rather than locking them out and giving them instead to illegal aliens. Then there is the whole undermining the country thing. Think those illegal immigrants really care about ideas like constitutional government and the rule of law? Think they have the background and the education? No way Jose, we're busy importing a new, permanent underclass while simultaneously pulling the support out from under our own poor working class.
So who benefits from illegal immigration? Corporations like Walmart, Tyson, Pilgrim's Pride and their stockholders., general contractors who slake off $100,000 profit on a $200,000 home because they hired sub-standard illegal labor. It isn't the average consumer. It isn't the average American. The argument that we get lower priced oranges or chicken is a dubious one at best, and I've never seen anyone crunc
What does it say about our current lifestyle when even the bees are over stressed?
It says some people don't wait for the investigation or the science to start before they pronounce a verdict. The idea is more or less "Behind every bad thing happening in the world, the US must be responsible for it, and if not the US, then surely humanity." I'm not sure this says anything about our current lifestyle, considering the research and investigation has barely begun. But don't let that stop you from rushing out to make a conclusion.
I think he was referring to Islam in Spain as the civilisation that got destroyed, because Spanish Muslims had diverged significantly from those in Africa and the Middle East (or more correctly, African and Middle Eastern Muslims had diverged from them), so they can justifiably be regarded as a distinct civilisation with a unique culture. Unfortunately for them this meant that they were basically caught between a rock and a hard place, with Catholic Europe on one side who regarded them as enemies, and a stricter, more fundamentalist Islamic culture in Africa (i.e. the other side of Spain) that had also regarded them as enemies since at least the 11th century. What's surprising therefore is not that they ended up getting destroyed, as that was obviously inevitable, but rather that they lasted as long as they did when surrounded by such powerful and fanatical opponents
Hardly. And while we are waxing poetically for the peaceful and enlightened Muslim society built up in Spain, let's not forget how they built it up. By the imperial expansion and subjugation of Visigothic Spain (who in turn took it from the imperialistic Romans who in turn took it from the imperialistic Carthaginians). The Muslim invasion of Spain was a VERY violent and traumatic affair, that was brought about by disunity among the Visigothic nobles, and featured just as much repression and atrocities as the Reconquista did 400 years later (the Reconquista started in earnest in the 11th century).
As far as inevitability, nothing was inevitable. The "Spanish" Christians were as disorganized (and probably more so) than the Muslims were. El Cid, that great Christian warrior, fought on the side of Muslims as often as he did against them. Christian and Muslim states in Spain allied with each other, betrayed their alliances, and attacked each other frequently.
And as for the Reconquista, lets not forget who created "holy war". It wasn't the Christians. The polarization of the Catholics in Spain came about due to an accumulated 800 years of atrocities and subjugation at the hand of the Muslim Jihad. Sure, they built some nice mosques with some great geometric art work. Rome was built with the slave labor of millions and the plunder from hundreds of nations too.
True, food is not scarce, but we spend an enormous amount of energy to plant, fertilize, harvest, process, and distribute the food that we grow and raise. Increasing the efficiency (by various means, pest resistance, hardiness, ripeness duration, fertilizer requirements, water requirements) of food production can reduce our overall footprint.
Yeah... funny how they did well in other hurricanes, with the same people in charge.
Actually, the Federal response to Katrina ran along the same timeline as similar sized events in Florida. FEMA routinely tells states and local municipalities to be on their own for 2-5 days after a Hurriance. The big problem with Katrina was it hit a large urban area where a lot of the people were too damn stupid to leave. I remember in the day or two before the storm hit (I had been planning on going to New Orleans for a bachelor party), the US government was putting out notices recommend a complete evacuation of New Orleans, with words like "Catastrophic loss of life". A Category 5 hurricane is like a F2 to F3 tornado...300 miles wide.
There's an old saying that goes, never ascribe to malice what can be explained by mere incompetence.
And almost as if they want to only give any rebuilding contracts to non-local corporations
Given the amount of graft involved in Louisiana, this doesn't seem like such a bad idea. Remember, it was locals that used the levy money for other things, like building casinos, instead of actually spending the money on fixing the levies.
It's almost as if with 'Korina' they wanted to have the region decimated and cleared out of poor people in order to build a lot of resorts and such
That's exactly what happened. Bushco used the Haliburton Hurricane Machine (TM) just so all those poor black people would drown.
And you're a crazy consipiracy theorist if you even consider it.
Yep, pretty much. Bush has a lot easier, less noticeable, and less damaging ways to enrich his corporate buddies if that is what he wants to do.
Katrina is a non-example. It doesn't say anything about how government handles long-term infrastructure projects. It only says something about how government handles security and emergency situations.
I disagree. A substantial amount of time and money has been spent on disaster preparedness by the Government, but they seemingly overlooked relatively minor things like communications interoperability and task force coordination, which, among other things, led to trucks with supplies sitting idle while people were going hungry and thirsty in New Orleans.
Enforcement of law is divided by the constitution among two government branches, the executive (raids/arrests) and the judicial (binding rulings).
Semantic hair splitting, but you are right. Yet it's perfectly reasonable for a company to protect their property by reducing the consumer's ability to mis-use the property, just as it is perfectly reasonable for a consumer to avoid purchasing the product to begin with. They don't have to sell or license to you, and you don't have to buy or license from them.
You almost certainly aren't going to win a legal argument. The bottom line is the bottom line, however. If companies lose more money by driving away consumers than they would to piracy if they had no DRM, then companies will abandon DRM. I think this is what we are starting to see in the marketplace, rather than a triumph of fair use rulings in court.
you mean like the right to do whatever you please with your property in the privacy of your own home on your own computer?
Ah, but in the case of music, sofware, or video, you don't own that particular piece of property. The copyright holder does. And the copyright holder gets to define the terms of use. When you license the use of the music, software, or video, you are agreeing to abide by the terms of the license, contract, or EULA.
The very idea of "managed rights" flies in the face of the Constitution, the ideals of the Founding Fathers, and what it truly means to be American
I don't think those things mean what you think they mean. "Digital rights management" != inaliable rights as laid down by the U.S. Constitution and liberal political theory. Lets be clear here, the two have absolutely NOTHING to do with each other. Digital rights management is essentially a technology mechanism to enforce (or hinder the breaking of) contract law. The only thing it flies in the face of is consumer convenience. DRM certainly annoys me as a consumer, but I think things like no-knock warrants, the drug war, idefinite detention without trial, and asset forfeiture laws fly in the face of the Constitution, the ideals of the Founding Fathers just a tad more.
Media organisations are in the unique position that they are able to readily attract hits without using search engines like google as they already have a massive advertising medium - themselves. Have you ever visited a national newspaper webiste by searching for "national newspaper" in google?
No, I have not. But I have gone to news sites I never would've otherwise gone to or known about due to stories on google news. While the top newspapers in Belgium probably won't see their traffic plummet to zero, they probably would see an adverse traffic impact, which will correspondingly hurt their advertising revenue. Given the financial difficulties of running a newspaper these days (at least in the U.S., European papers may be fairing better), reducing your online traffic flow doesn't seem to be a very intelligent move when that traffic flow in turn drives advertising revenue.
Do you also complain about the "church" of heliocentrism or the "church" of the germ theory of disease?
I think it's a bit ironic that you decided to include the germ theory of disease, especially since that one had an uphill climb against medical and scientific dogma of the day, and sort of reinforces Chrichton's point that consensus in science can be a bad thing, especially when that consensus is used to quell alternative theories or data in what is fundamentally an unsettled field of study.
Unfortunately, cross-platform gaming is not much of a concern to most publishers. It's doubtful very many titles would recoup anything close to the cost of doing a port for their publishers, and the publishers are the guys pulling the strings these days on the really big have to have titles. Gaming is dominated by Windows, and high-end gaming is almost exclusively Windows based.
You are (or should I say, Conoco Phillips is) comparing federal government revenue versus oil company profit. Apples and oranges. What are the federal government's expenses, related to gasoline production, collection of these revenues, etc.?
You are substantially correct here. Speaking in terms of profit and loss with respect to the Federal government wasn't a good idea on my part simply because there's no way to calculate how much of that tax is gravy and how much of it goes to feed the bureaucracy.
Consider also that the 10 cpg profit is after paying all their employees, including, for instance, Conoco Phillips CEO James Mulva's $31 million salary (2005). And he's not the highest paid in the industry. This doesn't count as "net", this is called "cost of operations". Profitable companies spread the wealth around internally and then aim to meet their guidance numbers when choosing what to declare as profits.
Did you by chance see what Goldman Sachs paid their employees last year? Executive compensation is a separate topic for another time (and I think executive compensation is way out of hand), but the botton line is that oil companies are legally obligated to calculated profit and loss the same as every other company in America does...using GAAP rules and guidelines.
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And medical malpractice kills 250,000 people per year in the US. Although gun control advocates like to make the public health argument, it isn't about public health, it's about societal control and the elites being concerned about not having a monopoly of force. It's a lot harder to shove your agenda down the unwilling throats of the little people when they can fight back.
To imply that Ebay is responsible in anyway for Cho's deranged killing spree is dishonest and contemptible. It's not like Ebay or Paypal are firearm friendly to begin with.
What exactly is wrong with the iconic "ape to man progression"?
Many people view chimps and other apes as our less evolved cousins, when, speaking from an evolutionary point of view, they are every bit as evolved as us, they just happen to have evolved in different directions.
Btw, I am mentioning this despite being more on the side of those favoring tighter gun controls. There were 1,225 lethal gun accidents in 1995 (http://www.hpjc.org/issues_guncontrol.html)
s .htm
6 people drown in swimming pools in the United States every year. Accidental drowning is the 4th leading cause of accidental death in the United States (AHEAD of accidental gunshot wounds). Source: http://www.poolalarms.com/pool_drowning_statistic
Funny thing is, you don't see a well funded, politically smooth campaign to ban swimming pools, and constant media coverage every time there is a swimming pool incident, do you? This, despite the fact that a child is more likely to die due to a pool than a gun.
Gun control is nothing more than an attempt by the elites to acquire a permanent monopoly on the use of force relegating the citizens of this country to mere subjects more fit to be ruled than led or represented. All this is done under the guise of "public safety", but as just the brief example of the pools highlights, there are better, more appropriate vehicles for improving public safety if that was the intent. Virginia Tech wasn't made safer by being "Gun Free". For the 60 or 70 people shot, it was made much more unsafe because they were denied the one weapon that might've made a difference. And the gun banners reflexive instinct is to make everyone even more defenseless and dependent on authorities, who have done such a bang up job in these spree killings that, Utah excepting, not one single killer has been stopped by the police and instead stopped killing when they got tired of killing. Color me unimpressed.
There is no language requierment for legal imigration. The tighter system I refer to prety much screws over the people you want to imigrate to the US in favor of those you don't.
It goes like this. 1/7th of all legal immigrants into the US are Mexican. 1/2 of all illegal immigrants are Mexican. Illegal immigration outnumbers legal immigration by anywhere from 4x to 10x. Ipso facto, that guy at Taco Bell who doesn't speak English very well? Well, chances are good he's illegal. Not guaranteed of course, but pretty damn good. Various bodies have published estimates that anywhere from 25% to 75% of job growth in American over the past 4 years has gone to illegal aliens.
I.e A set number of skilled workers and an unlimited number of "family immigrants". That means Abdul has a Masters in Computer Science it is MORE difficult for him to immigrate than for his illiterate sister who marries an American janitor. As if that isn't bad enough the waiting list for her to file for the elderly parents is
Hey, I'm pro immigration on aggregate. However, I think we should have entrance criteria and the best entrance criteria, as you pointed out, should NOT be that you happen to have a relative already here.
PS: Ask Burger King (or any other US corporation) what penalties they face for employing an illegal alien.
Penalties have to be enforced to be effective. Under the Bush administration, Federal prosecutions for the hiring of illegals has almost vanished. At one point a couple of years ago, there had been *1* prosecution, total, compared to hundreds per year under Clinton. A few cases have very recently made the news, they are altogether the more remarkable because of the startling absence of any prosecutions over the last few years.
This has been an interesting conversation.
I agree. A few notes. 7. Immigration will eventually change everything about this country. (you seem to imply this is bad. I don't).
Not all change is bad, not all change is good. But I'm not a big fan of a false bill of goods, and that is, historically at least, what immigration proponents have sold. A good example is Edward Kennedy's comments on the 1965 Immigration Act. The bottom line is, in my opinion, if we're voting on something, or the government is "giving" us something, we need to know exactly what it is. A lot of the "fear mongering" out there is simply a counter to all the happiness and sunshine propoganda out there on illegal immigration. Illegal immigration, as a movement, is well financed and coordinated, with teams of lawyers in place to file injuctions and lawsuits at the first whiff of anti-illegal legislation or action. The anti-illegal immigration movement, as a whole, is a lot newer and less organized. Which is ironic considering the majority of Americans (and legal immigrants I might add) are very anti-illegal immigration. Why is something that most Americans don't want being forced down our throat? I disagree that we can simply remove the social net from beneath them. These people need health care from time to time. Their only option is an emergency room or death. In most cases, they probably wait until their situation gets so bad that they must the emergency room. This is a shame. Many illnesses and diseases could be treated by a lower cost primary care physician, if they have access too it. Maybe this new idea of having low cost primary care doctors working in places like Walmart or Target is a good idea. (They plan to charge $40 for a 15 minute consultation).
I agree you can't simply remove it, but a weening process needs to take place. Hospitals are literally going out of business because on the one hand, they can't refuse service, but don't get reimbursed by the illegal alien patients who vanish when it comes time to pay the bill. And now the Federal government, in many cases, isn't reimbursing hospitals for the cost of treating these people, despite the fact that it's the Federal government that says they have to treat them. This is just one of many problems that need to be addressed.
When you talk about removing the net from beneath them, I get this image of a woman about to give birth, or a man just hit by a car waiting outside an ER. Then the admissions nurse refuses to let them in because they are undocumented. I just can't see them being that cruel. It's not ethical, inhumane, and doesn't fit with the American value system.
Emotional reasoning tends to make really bad legislation. People can heave hearts, bureaucracies never do.
This represents a deap misonderstanding of what imigration dose to nations. Here is how it work,
Step 1: Workers leave == Country gets poorer.
Step 2. Workers come in == Country gets richer.
Uh, no, this isn't how it works. Workers flow towards prosperity, they don't necessarily create it. For example, the Yugoslav exodus hasn't exactly created booming economies in the countries where they immigrated to.
That is one of the reasons that the USA got to be a Superpower.
The USA became a super power for a whole lot of reasons, none of them having anything at all to do with illegal immigration. And, as a matter of fact, in the two decades prior to WW2 and the two decades after, through post-war boom, the US had a very restrictive immigration policy.
Now that you are tightening up immigration and reducing the number of legal immigrants. Then structuring systems to keep illegal immigrants out of the formal system (illegal aliens can't even work at Burger King, but can peddle, sex and drugs like anybody else)
Guess you haven't been to Burger King lately? Or Taco Bell, or any other fast food join. Where I live, the workers are almost all illegals, judging by their lack of mastery of the English language. For a group of folks denied entry to the formal system, they sure are working for quite a few corporations.
The US is on it's way down realetive to the rest of the world and I am frightened by what may happen when you loose economic dominance while still retaining Military dominance.
No country in the world accepts more immigrants per year than the United States, both illegal and legal. So, in other words, you're pretty much wrong on every single point you tried to make in your post, although you did manage to put in some nice leftist pablum.
So, lets clarify something. I don't hold a grudge against the average immigrant, illegal or otherwise. Given the same situation as them, I might do exactly the same thing. The other day I read a story about a high school teacher in Mexico who, after teaching school, went on to do a full shift of odd jobs, all in order to make $12,000 a year. On the other hand, if he were to cross the border and work illegally in the US, he could make around $24,000 - $26,000 as a carpenter working only 8 hours or so a day. It doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure out the rational choice in that situation, and very little of the "fault" falls on the individual.
That being said, the way the current structure is configured, the incentives are entirely geared to rewarding illegal immigration. First, the jobs are here. Secondly, unlike in Mexico, they can get free medical care here, regardless of documentation or ability to pay. Third, once they get dependents (aka anchor babies), they are eligible for the full gamut of social welfare assistance. It's a really good deal for a poor, uneducated person.
My solution is simple. First, go after the companies, corporations and individuals that hire illegal aliens with fines and jail sentences. Remove their ability to claim an illegal alien as a deductible salary expense. Secondly, remove the social welfare net from under illegals. You're here legally, you still get it. You're here illegally, you don't. Probably not practical in the short run, but something needs to be done to prevent illegals from using hospital emergency rooms as their primary care providers (among other things).
Giving legal status may cost us something --- forgiving some back taxes on $3 an hour wages.
FYI, most illegals are paid far better than $3 hr. Typically they are paid what an American citizen would make for that line of work, with the caveat that their presence in the work force en masse has lowered the overall wage for those types of work.
As for enrolling in courses legally, and working towards jobs with benefits, honestly, more power to them. The demographic trend, however, is not very promising. 1st generation American born to illegal parents actually do worse than their parents. They get the lazy American work ethic instead of the immigrant work ethic, combined with the immigrant education (there are exceptions to this, of course, but the overall Latin attitude towards education is mostly negative). Seriously: Do you really think increasing enforcement or penalties will really help the situation? In my opinion we are pushing illegals into a corner in which some of them think that illegal (felony level, i mean) activity is a good option. There has to be some compromise here.
The short answer is: yes, I do think it will help. It won't eliminate the problem, but the problem is one of mass and numbers. We can't continue to import 10 million illegal, poor, uneducated immigrants per year without serious social consequences. To the AC who asked "what gives us the right to decide who can come and who can't", well, we do. This is, at a certain level, a zero sum game. There are over 6 billion people in the planet, the majority of them poor. A lot of them would love to come to the US...far more than the US could hold and still be the country that makes immigrants want to come to it or a country that Americans would recognize. A balance has to be struck. And it isn't.
This is why I use the term "fear-mongering". I bring up illegal aliens adding value to the economy. You bring up murders and jailed statistics.
Only an idiot thinks bringing up facts in a debate is "fear mongering". The bottom line is, you cannot assess the "positive" economic impact of illegal immigration because much of the impact goes into the grey or black market where statistics are hard to come by. However, you can assess the negative economic impact fairly easily...at least, where statistics are kept. In a debate about the merits of illegal immigration, bringing up the negative impact of illegal immigration isn't "fear mongering", it's "staying on topic". You have this image of scheming Mexicans sitting across the border loading their guns and sharpening their knives thinking of ways to kill Americans! yeah!
Hmm...it's safe to say you have no idea what I think. Hint: my fiance is a 2nd generation Mexican-American.
There may be some of these people. They are probably part of the illegal drug trade.
And what you probably are ignorant of is the fact that the people involved in the illegal drug trade are the same people involved in the illegal people trafficking trade.
This should not be confused with the majority of these people. Most of them live in poverty.
Most of them live in poverty because the average education level of illegal immigrants coming from Mexico, Central America, and South America is around the 8th grade. They come over poor, and those that stay remain poor. They form homogenous communities where poverty is entrenched and spans generations. You may like the idea of being able to hire a cheap nanny or pay an "undocumented worker" substandard wages to mow your lawn, but personally, I find the whole regime to be oppressive. They see the wealth of the US, and decide they should go there, despite the risks, and get a job. This way they can earn a meager living and send their kids through American schools so that they can grow up to have good productive lives. The long term payoff is positive.
You must be a stockholder for Tyson, or Walmart. I challenge you to provide any meaningful statistics that demonstrate a long term positive payoff from massive levels of illegal immigration.
Is America only meant for Decedents of white Europeans? Is that the bottom line of your argument?
Besides logic, reading comprehension doesn't seem to be your forte. My argument is that illegal immigration, especially of the numbers and character of the illegal immigrants (education level, criminality level), is a net negative. Once you factor in the impact to Social Security and Medicaid, which are already doomed to insolvency, the problem becomes even more acute given the burden that illegals place on those systems. Legitimizing them will accelerate the problem, btw.
Why can't we give the hard-working, law-abiding, family-values type illegal alian legal work status?
Wow, you are a dunce. They aren't law-abiding if they come over illegally, steal someone else's social security number and commit identity fraud. Now, they may not be on the level of rapists and murderers, but hey, there's plenty of them coming over too. It's the gift that keeps on giving.
Who cares if we forgive some of their unpaid taxes
All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others. If you don't see the flaw in this, you are beyond hope. so we don't have to pay for so much enforcement.
You don't even know how much we pay for enforcement, but hint: it's a lot less than we pay on jailing and treating them in hospitals.
It looks like its an arms race then.
That's exactly what parasite-host relationships are. Evolution isn't so much a march in a straight line, but a vicious cycle of decimation-immunization-regression to naivete-back to decimation, ie, the Red Queen hypothesis. The really interesting thing is the degree to which parasites have affected evolution. A lot of secondary sex characteristics, because of their biological expense, are really good indicators of parasite resistance.
Every time I hear an argument like this I get frustrated. People always say things based on dubious math calculated by fear-mongering conservatives like "immigrants cost $10k/per year". However, they never stop to consider that migrant workers might actually ADD VALUE to the economic system. How much money to Americans save every year on food because of low-cost migrant labor? How about other services? I imagine that it more than offsets the dubious number of $10k/year in government services (if that's even correct).
There are few *tiny* flaws in your thinking.
One, "fear-mongering conservatives [sic]" rarely talk about the cost of "immigrants". The talk about the cost of illegal aliens. There is the economic cost, which can be quantified, and the social cost and is hard to define, but like porn, a lot of people know it when they see it.
So where does the economic cost of illegal aliens come from? Well, the obvious costs are incarceration costs. The US has approximately 2,000,000 people behind bars, and 1/3rd of them are illegal aliens. The average annual cost is $22650 per prisoner, which means we are spending over $1.5 billion per year on simply locking up illegal aliens for committing a pretty diverse set of crimes. Approximately 30-40% of illegal aliens are on some form of public assistance. Tack in the anchor babies that are considered citizens, but are otherwise economic drains (medical, social, and education expense), and it's clear our little experimentation with an illegal alien invasion (an estimated 4 to 10 million cross the border every year according to the Border Patrol, as referenced in House.gov document) is a net economic drain under the most optimistic models.
So how about the social cost? How many people are murdered by illegal aliens every year? DOJ doesn't really track it, but estimates are around 4,000 people. That's 4,000 people that, almost certainly, would be alive if not for those "undocumented immigrants" that you "liberals" love so much. And those murders are in addition to the rapes, assaults, DWIs (with injuries and fatalities), and property crime that, as a population group, illegal aliens are much more likely to commit than native Americans or legal immigrants. Oh, another social cost never remarked is the wage depression effect of illegal immigration, especially for blue collar jobs, and PARTICULARLY, this impact on other minority communities like African-Americans. But it's not limited to just them, either. Blue collar Americans of every stripe have seen their wages decline across the board, pretty much in-line with the massive increase in illegal immigration. Fast food used to the an entry level job for high school kids. It's now a bastion for illegal aliens. Same thing with lawn care, construction, handy-man work, road-work, meat-packing, brick-laying, etc. Guess what, not everyone gets to be a software engineer or doctor, and a just society would make pains to give it's citizens and legal immigrants the first shot at the jobs that are left, rather than locking them out and giving them instead to illegal aliens. Then there is the whole undermining the country thing. Think those illegal immigrants really care about ideas like constitutional government and the rule of law? Think they have the background and the education? No way Jose, we're busy importing a new, permanent underclass while simultaneously pulling the support out from under our own poor working class.
So who benefits from illegal immigration? Corporations like Walmart, Tyson, Pilgrim's Pride and their stockholders., general contractors who slake off $100,000 profit on a $200,000 home because they hired sub-standard illegal labor. It isn't the average consumer. It isn't the average American. The argument that we get lower priced oranges or chicken is a dubious one at best, and I've never seen anyone crunc
What does it say about our current lifestyle when even the bees are over stressed?
It says some people don't wait for the investigation or the science to start before they pronounce a verdict. The idea is more or less "Behind every bad thing happening in the world, the US must be responsible for it, and if not the US, then surely humanity." I'm not sure this says anything about our current lifestyle, considering the research and investigation has barely begun. But don't let that stop you from rushing out to make a conclusion.
I think he was referring to Islam in Spain as the civilisation that got destroyed, because Spanish Muslims had diverged significantly from those in Africa and the Middle East (or more correctly, African and Middle Eastern Muslims had diverged from them), so they can justifiably be regarded as a distinct civilisation with a unique culture. Unfortunately for them this meant that they were basically caught between a rock and a hard place, with Catholic Europe on one side who regarded them as enemies, and a stricter, more fundamentalist Islamic culture in Africa (i.e. the other side of Spain) that had also regarded them as enemies since at least the 11th century. What's surprising therefore is not that they ended up getting destroyed, as that was obviously inevitable, but rather that they lasted as long as they did when surrounded by such powerful and fanatical opponents
Hardly. And while we are waxing poetically for the peaceful and enlightened Muslim society built up in Spain, let's not forget how they built it up. By the imperial expansion and subjugation of Visigothic Spain (who in turn took it from the imperialistic Romans who in turn took it from the imperialistic Carthaginians). The Muslim invasion of Spain was a VERY violent and traumatic affair, that was brought about by disunity among the Visigothic nobles, and featured just as much repression and atrocities as the Reconquista did 400 years later (the Reconquista started in earnest in the 11th century).
As far as inevitability, nothing was inevitable. The "Spanish" Christians were as disorganized (and probably more so) than the Muslims were. El Cid, that great Christian warrior, fought on the side of Muslims as often as he did against them. Christian and Muslim states in Spain allied with each other, betrayed their alliances, and attacked each other frequently.
And as for the Reconquista, lets not forget who created "holy war". It wasn't the Christians. The polarization of the Catholics in Spain came about due to an accumulated 800 years of atrocities and subjugation at the hand of the Muslim Jihad. Sure, they built some nice mosques with some great geometric art work. Rome was built with the slave labor of millions and the plunder from hundreds of nations too.
Someone mod parent up. Humor is in short supply when it comes to environmental debates.
True, food is not scarce, but we spend an enormous amount of energy to plant, fertilize, harvest, process, and distribute the food that we grow and raise. Increasing the efficiency (by various means, pest resistance, hardiness, ripeness duration, fertilizer requirements, water requirements) of food production can reduce our overall footprint.
Yeah... funny how they did well in other hurricanes, with the same people in charge.
Actually, the Federal response to Katrina ran along the same timeline as similar sized events in Florida. FEMA routinely tells states and local municipalities to be on their own for 2-5 days after a Hurriance. The big problem with Katrina was it hit a large urban area where a lot of the people were too damn stupid to leave. I remember in the day or two before the storm hit (I had been planning on going to New Orleans for a bachelor party), the US government was putting out notices recommend a complete evacuation of New Orleans, with words like "Catastrophic loss of life". A Category 5 hurricane is like a F2 to F3 tornado...300 miles wide. There's an old saying that goes, never ascribe to malice what can be explained by mere incompetence.
And almost as if they want to only give any rebuilding contracts to non-local corporations
Given the amount of graft involved in Louisiana, this doesn't seem like such a bad idea. Remember, it was locals that used the levy money for other things, like building casinos, instead of actually spending the money on fixing the levies.
It's almost as if with 'Korina' they wanted to have the region decimated and cleared out of poor people in order to build a lot of resorts and such
That's exactly what happened. Bushco used the Haliburton Hurricane Machine (TM) just so all those poor black people would drown.
And you're a crazy consipiracy theorist if you even consider it.
Yep, pretty much. Bush has a lot easier, less noticeable, and less damaging ways to enrich his corporate buddies if that is what he wants to do.
Katrina is a non-example. It doesn't say anything about how government handles long-term infrastructure projects. It only says something about how government handles security and emergency situations.
I disagree. A substantial amount of time and money has been spent on disaster preparedness by the Government, but they seemingly overlooked relatively minor things like communications interoperability and task force coordination, which, among other things, led to trucks with supplies sitting idle while people were going hungry and thirsty in New Orleans.
Government sucks at building and maintaining infrastructure, but it doesn't suck at making it interoperate.
You obviously never served in the military, nor were you paying much attention when the government was busy non-interoperating during Katrina.
Enforcement of law is divided by the constitution among two government branches, the executive (raids/arrests) and the judicial (binding rulings).
Semantic hair splitting, but you are right. Yet it's perfectly reasonable for a company to protect their property by reducing the consumer's ability to mis-use the property, just as it is perfectly reasonable for a consumer to avoid purchasing the product to begin with. They don't have to sell or license to you, and you don't have to buy or license from them. You almost certainly aren't going to win a legal argument. The bottom line is the bottom line, however. If companies lose more money by driving away consumers than they would to piracy if they had no DRM, then companies will abandon DRM. I think this is what we are starting to see in the marketplace, rather than a triumph of fair use rulings in court. you mean like the right to do whatever you please with your property in the privacy of your own home on your own computer?
Ah, but in the case of music, sofware, or video, you don't own that particular piece of property. The copyright holder does. And the copyright holder gets to define the terms of use. When you license the use of the music, software, or video, you are agreeing to abide by the terms of the license, contract, or EULA.
The very idea of "managed rights" flies in the face of the Constitution, the ideals of the Founding Fathers, and what it truly means to be American
I don't think those things mean what you think they mean. "Digital rights management" != inaliable rights as laid down by the U.S. Constitution and liberal political theory. Lets be clear here, the two have absolutely NOTHING to do with each other. Digital rights management is essentially a technology mechanism to enforce (or hinder the breaking of) contract law. The only thing it flies in the face of is consumer convenience. DRM certainly annoys me as a consumer, but I think things like no-knock warrants, the drug war, idefinite detention without trial, and asset forfeiture laws fly in the face of the Constitution, the ideals of the Founding Fathers just a tad more.
Media organisations are in the unique position that they are able to readily attract hits without using search engines like google as they already have a massive advertising medium - themselves. Have you ever visited a national newspaper webiste by searching for "national newspaper" in google?
No, I have not. But I have gone to news sites I never would've otherwise gone to or known about due to stories on google news. While the top newspapers in Belgium probably won't see their traffic plummet to zero, they probably would see an adverse traffic impact, which will correspondingly hurt their advertising revenue. Given the financial difficulties of running a newspaper these days (at least in the U.S., European papers may be fairing better), reducing your online traffic flow doesn't seem to be a very intelligent move when that traffic flow in turn drives advertising revenue.
Maybe Google should just delink the sites altogether, that way the offended media organizations can watch their traffic plummet to zero?
Do you also complain about the "church" of heliocentrism or the "church" of the germ theory of disease?
I think it's a bit ironic that you decided to include the germ theory of disease, especially since that one had an uphill climb against medical and scientific dogma of the day, and sort of reinforces Chrichton's point that consensus in science can be a bad thing, especially when that consensus is used to quell alternative theories or data in what is fundamentally an unsettled field of study.
Unfortunately, cross-platform gaming is not much of a concern to most publishers. It's doubtful very many titles would recoup anything close to the cost of doing a port for their publishers, and the publishers are the guys pulling the strings these days on the really big have to have titles. Gaming is dominated by Windows, and high-end gaming is almost exclusively Windows based.
You are (or should I say, Conoco Phillips is) comparing federal government revenue versus oil company profit. Apples and oranges. What are the federal government's expenses, related to gasoline production, collection of these revenues, etc.?
You are substantially correct here. Speaking in terms of profit and loss with respect to the Federal government wasn't a good idea on my part simply because there's no way to calculate how much of that tax is gravy and how much of it goes to feed the bureaucracy.
Consider also that the 10 cpg profit is after paying all their employees, including, for instance, Conoco Phillips CEO James Mulva's $31 million salary (2005). And he's not the highest paid in the industry. This doesn't count as "net", this is called "cost of operations". Profitable companies spread the wealth around internally and then aim to meet their guidance numbers when choosing what to declare as profits.
Did you by chance see what Goldman Sachs paid their employees last year? Executive compensation is a separate topic for another time (and I think executive compensation is way out of hand), but the botton line is that oil companies are legally obligated to calculated profit and loss the same as every other company in America does...using GAAP rules and guidelines.