SmirkingRevenge

In the US, anti-immigrant sentiment is often the highest in regions with relatively few immigrants, far away from the border. The less that immigrants are part of peoples daily lives, the more people seem to fear for their "culture".

Presuming to have any real agency over the evolution of human culture also seems misguided. Culture is like a river, in that "no man ever steps into the same one twice". It's constantly changing in unpredictable ways, from generation to generation or even within generations, with or without immigration. That goes for the cultures of immigrants also.

> But corporations have abused the system to unnecessarily employ immigrant labor in lieu of American

I'm not going to say this has never happened, but in general I don't think it's common or widespread. Generally, businesses going to the trouble of bringing in foreign labor through the various programs are trying to fulfill labor shortages.

You should be able to see evidence of it happening in jobs and unemployment numbers. You'd see it higher unemployment among American citizens than the workforce as a whole

Towards the end of the Biden admin, there was a great jobs report, but right-wing media and MAGA pundits spun it by saying the vast majority of all the new jobs were taken by immigrants.

That wasn't a lie, but it wasn't because immigrants were taking jobs that would have otherwise been filled with Americans as they tried to portray. If you looked at the employment numbers by citizenship status, citizens were sitting about as close to full employment as we could ever be. The only way to fill those jobs was to expand the labor pool.

Tariffs hurt domestic manufacturing for a number of reasons, but one of the major ones is because something like 50% of our manufacturing inputs are imported.

Also FWIW - the US is the second largest manufacturer in the world, only behind China due to it's larger population. Our productivity per worker blows China away (though they are catching up) and is the best in the world. We manufacture plenty and do it well.

This idea that we have lost manufacturing and we need some push to onshore it all again is... well... another manufactured problem that isn't.

I mostly agree, except that trade imbalances are not problems and don't really cause problems.

Buying and selling don't need to be equal between buyers and sellers, and it's really just an incoherent idea.

That is definitely a flatly wrong statement. Unfortunately, it reinforces the Trumpian disinformation that tariffs are fees that other countries pay us... or something.

Trump is taxing Americans when he imposes tariffs. Canada is taxing Canadians when they impose retaliatory tariffs.

And FWIW, most economists think retaliatory tariffs are stupid - on net they cause more harm to the retaliating country than if there were no retaliation. But the politics around tariffs are stupid too. It's all stupid.

FWIW, I've found it to be far less toxic as a lurker. Most people act sane and fairly nice.

Bluesky at least has really robust blocking features. Using them really reduces the toxicity that bubbles into your feed.

I think guys like Singal don't really like Bluesky because their engagement model just doesn't work as well there as it does on twitter. That faintly snarky, passive-aggressive, often concern-trollish, kind of rage-baiting for attention, both negative and positive, kind of tone.

I'm not sure why it doesn't seem to work as well, exactly. Maybe it's the block features. Maybe it's the feeds. Maybe its the user demographics that resulted from the self-selected twitter exodus.

I think it's a combination of all those factors - but keep in mind, one reason you see some of these people write polemics against Bluesky is because they just don't know how to get attention there.

Most users would probably rather block than respond to the bait - that practice got baked into the early bluesky culture. So the only ones left to take the bait are the unhinged, death-threatening, types.

What's funny is that people who use social media to drive traffic seem to consistently say they get more real click throughs to their content from bsky than twitter, despite having a fraction of the follower counts and post engagement that they have on twitter (even before all the barriers Musk enacted to keep users on twitter).

They're pretty well known for lawlessly purging bureaucracies of experienced, civil servants loyal to the rule of law, to make way for cronies and regime loyalists.

They're pretty well known for scapegoating and persecuting immigrants and minorities and "enemies within" - and engaging in political projects to imprison and/or eject them from the nation.

Musk didn't cut government spending. Legally, only congress can do that. They increased spending. 10s of billions of that spending has gone to towards a mass build out of prison camps where many people, citizens included, are being held in horrid conditions indefinitely without due process and without being charged with any crime. This seems to be a project that Musk supports.

Turns out draining swamps is actually a bad thing.

One such example - he's using his massive wealth and influence to support fascist political movements that promise mass deportation and "remigration", and even supporting these policies explicitly himself.

In the US, his political beneficiaries have managed to "achieve" net negative migration to the US for the first time in 50 years, and the first decline in overall population in US history.

If this becomes the new trend (and if Musk gets his political desires fulfilled, it might), the hole is getting much, much deeper while our capacity to climb out is being severely impaired.

And oh yea, he killed hundreds of thousands of kids, mostly under 5.

Lots of those people complaining about population decline aren't really talking about the absolute number. They're dog-whistling about demographic replacement - the idea that minorities are reproducing too fast and whites are reproducing too slow.

Half of America thinks the only way to solve Republican-caused disasters is to elect more Republicans

It becomes sort of like the dystopian future imagined in William Gibson's "The Peripheral" - most of the human race has died off, but technology has advanced so that the elites can self-sustain anyhow. Big cities are haunted with holograms running scripts of people going about their day to make them feel lived in.

CATO has been quite good of late at dismantling many of the worst of the Trump GOP's initiatives with real research. They're immigration research is a great resource to rebut the nativist MAGA nonsense.

Running up massive debt and deficits is also a way to kill appetite for D priorities that require new spending.

The best way to make sense of the GOP is in it's opposition to wealth redistribution. Primarily downward wealth redistribution. That's their north star.

Upward redistribution is mostly OK though, they consider it just giving rich people their own money back

> I will not ignore the evidence of my eyes and ears

The gesture he made matched the Nazi salute. With gusto. Eyes, ears plus the video confirm it. There's nowhere to hide on this one.

If you want to be charitable, you can argue that it wasn't the intent behind the gesture, but you can't argue he didn't actually do the gesture. We all can see that he did and so can you.

The main problem with being charitable in this case, is that he demonstrates on a near daily basis that he's undeserving of it.

> Only on reddit do people believe stupid shit like that. You should stop getting your information second hand. It's rotting your brain.

I don't know where the preoccupation with reddit comes from here, I don't do politics there. All you have to do is read Elon's twitter feed to confirm what I said is all true.

Hallucinogenic experiences can be really specific to particular hallucinogens.

There are some hallucinogens that only produce auditory hallucinations. We don't really have a reason to think those are real sounds.

There are others that will not make you visually hallucinate in the regular sense, but will mess with how your brain interprets what you see - scrambling your internal visual object classifiers, so to speak - so that distinct things sort of melt together in your mind.

Hallucinogens are wild. But I think they are the same as any other drug that has predictable effects, like alcohol or pot.

Maybe it throws us for a loop because subjective experience of hallucinogens are so bizarre and varied and often intense. They truly do weird things to us.

The reason it is so believable is that he did it and it happened, in public.

He contributes to this understanding by straight-forwardly promoting and agreeing with white nationalists and even straight-up neo-nazi accounts on twitter, and by promoting neo-nazi aligned political parties.

I remember looking around at the people in my friend and family circles who supported and defended the imprisonment of migrants at CECOT, often repeating the propaganda that they were terrorists and criminals, etc - and realizing chances are they'd do the same if it happened to me. Quite a surreal, scary feeling.

> That over 35% of the population are completely fine with this stuff is frightening

Most literally don't even know, because what little information filters down to them, is all radical right-wing propaganda from Fox or worse. The country has been drowning in it for decades.

I think the biggest risk of war between nuclear powers is from mistakes and accidents that might trigger nuclear escalation/MAD. Systems can malfunction. War can spiral out of control, fast.

We had some very close calls in the cold war.

I think this comes out in the wash mostly.

While we're going to have lots of officers who've been to war for a while yet, turnover eventually evens the playing field.

The people who would be doing the actual fighting in a war today have never been to war.

And as we've seen in Ukraine, warfare is always evolving, making some subset of past war experience less valuable.

> For the most-dominant military power in the world to "whoopsy" run out of weapons because of a low-stakes engagement isn't readily believable.

Sadly, I find it very believable. To build them costs lots of time and money. To use them, not so much. Going low tech might risk more casualties in some cases - and so all the political problems that follow along from that.

We've also seen plenty of wishful thinking from the civilian leaders of the military. I'm sure that in their minds, each strike they launch is surely the one that will finally break Iran, better hit them with the good stuff, shock and awe.

They've also been purging all kinds of top military officers, presumably over culture war issues and insufficient sycophancy.

Eh, I think there's a kind of survivorship bias in this POV: "We've survived authoritarians in the past, so the system working as intended, everything is fine".

I don't think things are working as intended, even if they've sort of worked by accident so far.

I think it's better to look at more contemporary backsliding democracies and fascist regimes from the 20th century onward to really understand our trajectory. Russia (Putin), Hungary (Orban), India (Modi), Germany (Hitler), Italy (Mussolini), Spain (Franco), etc.

The American Right has trying to Orbanify the country by explicitly copying his model. Hungary was able to eventually oust him, dealing a blow to that whole project, but time will tell whether they will be able to keep him and his allies out for good. Our wanna-be Orbans are still there.

The corruption we're seeing in the Trump admin has no precedent in American history, and is the kind of large scale open corruption only seen in autocratic regimes or failed states.

The founders envisioned that branches would jealously guard their power, but congress right now is essentially a duma. The judiciary is still mostly standing, but the Trump admin is defying court orders at an alarming rate, and the longer these guys hold power, the more they will be able to work on the courts.

Better to say the current US government is run by authoritarians, doing everything they can to convert the US government into an authoritarian one. And they've gotten way farther than they should.

We're a backsliding democracy, and risk backsliding into fully consolidated autocracy, unless we mount effective resistance.

So many of those books are basically like those "Here's one weird trick to succeed at X" style articles in book length form.

Tesla could have found a path forward without Musk. It might've been painful or even dangerous financially, but they could've come up with something. Same with the other companies Musk "runs".

So long Musk remains at the head of any public company, despite everything that has happened - despite Musk being literally personally responsible for large scale atrocity and mass-death - not to mention all white supremacist stuff he's doing daily it seems, there's no real trade-offs for us plebs to fuss over.

Those companies should pay a price. Musk has turned himself into a real force for real evil in the world, yet they choose to be a party to it, because it's financially convenient.

So... any company that chooses to still keep him at the helm should be facing down total ruination, until and unless they decide to remedy the situation. If never do, well they've made their choice.

I mean, Musk should probably be in jail for a very long time, but at the very least, he should be blacklisted in the business and financial (and political) world, for good.

Blame Musk himself. He did this.

He jumped right into the center of US politics, and turned himself into one of the most toxic figures within it, while acting like an unhinged conspiracy addled maniac. Then he broke the law and killed a bunch of the poorest people in the world with his DOGE chainsaw (Trump shares equal blame tbf).

He used a bunch of star-struck 20-something "hardcore" rookie devs to be his executioners. Young devs like many of the commenters/readers on this site. Besides having the deaths of thousands directly on their conscience, some of those kids may face real legal jeopardy after all this. Is that something anyone here wants for themselves or any their fellow industry people here on HN?

Compartmentalizing tech interest away from real moral and political consequences is how, despite technical brilliance, you can end up a useful idiot and a party to atrocity.

Years ago these kinds of dilemmas were farther away. Tech wasn't as embroiled in politics. Tech hadn't eaten everything yet. Now it has and these dilemmas are in front of us today.

> I don't know I felt like for 4 years we were hammered about defunding police or something. If you tell me that's far-left that's fine, but realize that's what your news has been pushing.

As another commenter said, sounds like you are internalizing right-wing propaganda about what Democrats do, and mixing it up with what Democrats actually do. By and large, the party rejected that idea.

I can only even think of one or two right-wing media outfits that are serious and reality based (The Dispatch) - if you're listening to just about anyone else on the right, it's a fever swamp of conspiracy theories and fun-house mirror delusional reality. It's really, really bad in the Trump era, the entire right wing media apparatus is now organized entirely around his Orwellian lies.

> I'm also certain that without ICE there would literally be unlimited immigration

Before 9/11, there was no ICE. Immigration violations were treated as an administrative matter. Immigration enforcement was a job for guys with clipboards, not guns - and should be again.

> Also if nobody is "for crime" why are people that are arrested 45 times still out killing people? The judges and prosecutors found to be releasing these people are 100% democratic placed.

Do you have specific cases in mind here? In any case, judges don't have unlimited discretion on these kinds of things. There are laws and guidelines on this stuff. You can't just lock someone up for life for a bunch of misdemeanors or other petty crimes.

You always have to vet these kinds of claims by looking at whether the judges followed the law or abused discretion, etc.