blockmarker

Following that principle, Bin Laden wouldn't be responsible for 9/11, ISIS shouldn't have been restricted or attacked in any way, and the mafia should be fully legal. That would be absurd.

Fireworks are explosives, and people are hurt by misusing them. Just because they are less harmful than grenades doesn't mean that they are harmless, and throwing them at someone is clearly with the intention of harming them. And well, shooting them with rifles is also clearly intended to harm them.

In 2022, 20% of the population of Sweden was born outside of Sweden. I'm not the one engaging in willful ignorance. And unless you are saying that these people are slaves, the only purpose of mentioning slavery is character assassination

This presupposes many things which are not reasonable to suppose. Like these immigrants being economically useful instead of fiscally negative their whole lives, or that people are just interchangeable economic units and forcing together separate groups will not cause any trouble.

Overcrowding by immigrants does not mean the location will vote in favor of restricting immigration. After all, those are the places with the highest number of immigrant voters, who will not support such restrictions.

27% of Swiss residents were born outside the country. Can there ever be a limit to immigration, or will it always mean you are literally Hitler and want to exterminate millions?

While the powers pushing this aren't doing it for protecting children, there are many people who want restricting the internet to protect children. This is why it's a good cover instead of an obvious power grab, because parents want to stop their ten year old children from seeing porn or getting addicted to social media, but they don't know much about how to do it, the technology involved or who is pushing it. You might not want any child control, as many in HN don't, but in general the people do. And if you make parents choose between the current free for all and the government knowing the identity of every user, they will choose the second. Sure, the government would probably not protect the children even after requiring ID, but by then it would be too late.

On one hand we have propaganda not even a century old, only possible by the invention of birth control, the creation of tv, radio and newspapers, which itself required the invention of many things such as communications faster than horseback, the existence of strong centralized states which guarantee welfare to the elderly even if they don't have children to maintain it, and technological advances and social changes which make children an expense instead of an economic asset. And this propaganda leads to societies slowly economically collapse and their populations go extinct.

On the other hand, we have the "propaganda" which has existed for thousands if not millions of years, needed no technological, scientific or economic advances to exist, and the societies that followed it grew and made all the advances required for the other.

Of the two, I know which seems to be truer and more natural.

The goal is privacy and anonymity. Removing them that is. They don't care about teenagers watching porn, what they want is to know what every person is reading and saying, and being able to punish whoever says things the eurocrats don't like. That's the reason the age limits are not set in the device by the parents, but you must give your id to some entity.

We aren't talking about a painting in a private gallery, it's a big object in the middle of the street. If it was actually unauthorized it would be removed, even if the British government respected free speech. If artists could actually place at night their works and not be removed, the streets would be blocked due to the number of statues. This clearly seems to be a sponsored work with typical Banksy marketing, like the work that got half-shredded at its auction.

I am not aware of all the nuances of the immigration system, but legal and illegal seem a flawed but still somewhat useful measure. Though legal includes both farm workers and software developers and doctors, which makes it even less useful.

And that immigrants do not get most entitlements because the system doesn't work that way seems flawed. The official numbers say that there are 14 million illegal immigrants in the US, and the trustworthiness of those numbers is questionable. It is clear the system is not working properly.

And if Cato wants to talk in public Twitter they should expect questions and answers. And I'm not talking about trolls and haters, but when they respond to intelligent, respectful, high-quality comments from people who know about the subject, with snark and arrogance, with emotional arguments, and sleazy and disingenuous replies, pretending to not understand simple concepts, I don't believe that they are acting in good faith or care about the truth.

I understand that the US has Jus Solis and as such the children of immigrants are legally equivalent to the children of citizens, but that doesn't mean that the economic effect of the children of immigrants should be attributed to all citizens. There is an implicit question and answer of whether immigration is economically beneficial, and the effects of immigration include the children. If the child of every immigrant raised the deficit by a hundred million one would be crazy to support immigration, even if the parents reduced the deficit by a million. Not so in Cato's analysis. It would in fact make increasing immigration look better. For this reason separating between the children of immigrants and non-immigrants would be the correct thing to do, even if legally they are the same. It would be more difficult to do but not impossible at all. If Congress does not collect the data, Cato could do it themselves, or convince Congress to collect it. It is not impossible, they just refuse because it would harm their favored proposal.

You don't have to accept children that don't exist from parents that aren't in the country yet. If the children are bad enough you can refuse to even let the parents inside in the first place.

Changing the methodology would lead to greater clarity. If in reality it's the opposite of what I believe and the second generation is better than non-immigrants, it wouldn't show with this methodology. If the second generation is better than even the first, we wouldn't know. If the second gen is equal to non-immigrants we don't know. More knowledge is always better. Data may support infinite hypothesis, but more data will lead to more correct ones.

As for my belief that the second generation is a drain, I know it's not very scientific, but it's based on a few things: I believe at least 30% of people are net taxtakers, though I've seen claimed up to 80%(probably due to pensions and elderly healthcare). Stereotipically latino immigrants, who would be farm workers, meat packers and construction workers would have children with similarly low socioeconomic status, and they are more than let's say, software developers with H1B. And Cato's behaviour: If the whole truth benefitted them they would use it. It's very reasonable to suspect they are a net drain, enough that any studies should not assume without looking that they aren't.

There is always an implicit argument that immigration is bad or good for the economy. In Cato's analysis, the worse children of immigrants are, the better immigration looks.

It is not the same as if citizens had children, because no matter if their children are fiscally beneficial or not, we have no option but to accept them. For immigrants it is different, one would only allow immigration if it benefits the citizens, and their children might change the answer. In this case, you can say that the costs of increasing the number of children of such socioeconomic status is greater than the benefits brought by their immigrant parents.

But in this analysis, the worse the children of immigrants are, the better raising immigration looks. This would not be a problem if this article instead of citizen/non-citizen used first, second gen, and non-immigrant, as is the standard. It would be more clear and informative. But Cato refuses.

It's generally the former, your net fiscal impact includes your education and other childhood expenses. That is a reason why immigration is supposedly so good, another country spent their money raising them but your country gets the tax contributions from the worker. (This does not necessarily mean that the immigrant is actually a net taxpayer, as many european countries have found out.)

Such analysis generally distinguish between non-immigrants, first generation immigrants, and second generation immigrants. Rarely third generation too, and also separates based on the education level, legal or illegal, and country of origin.

Given than in western countries immigrants generally remain and have children who will get government assistance such as free education, one should take into account second generation data as part of immigration.

I am no erudite who has read a million papers, but I haven't seen any analysis for Europe that compares citizens and non-citizens, and for good reason, it's not informative. Here for example two different groups are mixed, non-immigrants and second generation immigrants. Given the lower socioeconomic status of most immigrants, the greater aid given to the second generation might eliminate any savings caused by the first generation, but in this article the cost of second gen is used to make the first generation look better compared to non-immigrants.

This might have been a mistake, but people on Twitter explained it to senior Cato members, and their answers make it clear that it was not a mistake but a deliberate decision. So they are deceivers, even if they do not technically say anything false.

The costs incurred by the children of immigrants are obviously a cost of immigration, but in Cato's analysis, the more expensive the children of immigrants are, the better immigrants look in comparison to natives. If every child of immigrants increased the deficit by 50 million dollars, Cato says that immigration should be increased because citizens increase the deficit so much. This is clearly deceit to supoort their favored conclusions.

I will not read anything the Cato Institute puts out, they are disingenuous partisans. They do not include the cost caused by the children, such as education and healthcare, they do not even include the cost of welfare to the children or to the household, since the children are legally citizens. It's very easy to say that immigrants are good for the economy when the greatest expenses are attributed to non-immigrants. Do not listen to Cato or read their articles, you would just be feeding yourself lies.

Elon has spent months and months calling for the Epstein files to be released, even had a big spat with Trump over that and some other things. The idea that he was actually raping girls with Epstein can only be believed by people who will believe anything if it puts their enemies in a bad light. Which are also generally the same people making fake emails and sharing them to defame people they dislike, or editing family photos to pretend they were abuse.

Yeah yeah, the person you dislike is stupid and the success of his multiple companies is just luck and everybody else does the work.

It is not at all certain that there was any sabotage. Supposedly it was sabotage because important wires were stolen, but wire has been stolen by criminals for decades to sell for the materials. And for the last few years there has been an increase of delays, breakdowns and failures in the whole railway network. It is far more likely that common theft on a decaying system caused the problems, but that would pin the blame on the government for this decay. As such they prefer to blame anyone else, including shadowy enemies sabotaging the country.

Letting your interests always go last, and letting people who depend on you and have worked against you(remember Zelenski campaigned against Trump), demand things and reproach you in public, is not tact. The one who lacked tact was Zelenski, not Vance. As Trump said, "You're in no position to dictate what we're gonna feel."

As for aid, the arrogance in assuming the aid was mandatory and failing to give what you want the way you want is wrong and evil, does not endear people to aid you. And besides, any delays in aid had a much lesser effect than the EU countries buying russian gas at exorbitant prices. The sanctions imposed were immediately sabotaged by buying russian gas.

The argument that mass deportations are some impossible ordeal is only defended by those that are deeply invested in that they don't happen.

Most illegal immigrants are only in the US for economic reasons. Don't give them any welfare, make hiring them actually illegal and punish the companies that hire them. When this happens, many of them will just go back to their country.

Then if somehow their countries refused to take in their own citizens, they can just be sanctioned, or stop being given foreign aid by the US.

The only reason you believe that mass deportations are impossible and would cause an apocalyse, is because you really want it to be true.

The idea that we should allow our countries and our way of life to be ruined because of something that happened 70 years ago is absurd.

You are not the first to think that. That is called the Broken Window Fallacy, obviously by people who disagree. But it makes sense to me that if you spend resources on repairing damages, or weapons which don't generate more wealth, you are not investing and growing. What happened to the US in WW2 is an anomaly.

I am not well-read enough to really have a reasoned answer, but mine is that we don't know. But just because there is something more, something we don't understand, doesn't mean that it's something greater. It's just something we don't understand.

Through the ages people tried to answer the great mysteries with great answers, but they didn't achieve anything. Truth should have predictive power, and understanding of great enigmas should help explain lesser ones, like the laws of gravity can calculate the fall of an object, but these answers haven't done something useful. But lesser questions have been answered with lesser and less interesting answers, and they successfully predicted stuff. Through answering many small questions, we now know why rain happens, why the seasons change, or how eels and flies come into existence. And the domain of the great mysteries was reduced, bit by bit.

Trying to answer the great mysteries, like the origin of existence, is building a house from the roof. Religious experiences and the numinous can be better explained by psychiatry and medicine than by theology.

There might still be something not more, but greater, than our understanding. It is probable, since our intuition and our senses are limited. But if there is, it would be equal to a colour we don't see due to lacking color cones. We might be unable to intuitively explain how it's like to see color to a colorblind person, but it's not divine or magical, greater than the material world and what we can measure and calculate; it's just greater than our eyes or our vocabulary.

That is at least my belief. It was hard to write somewhat concisely my beliefs, but I think I did a good enough job. I must say I'm not opposed to trying to answer the great mysteries, it's very similar to when the ancient greek philosophers tried to find the origin of matter. But I do not believe real truth can be obtained that way.

Also, I must say that your comments in this post were great. A perspective very different to the common HN point of view, thought-provoking and in-depth. I also learned the word numinous, which makes me happy as I have now a word to describe something I couldn't before.

Crowley might have been a drug-addicted sophist and not a good source for seeking ultimate truths. But was he a good sophist? I am interested in occultism and symbology, but only as entertainment. I am certain of my materialistic beliefs. It might be that he is so popular here because he is clever and decadent, something shocking and thrilling if you don't take it as truth.

Also, was he actually a fun sophist? You seem to have read a lot so I would ask for your opinion. Is he worth reading for entertainment?

It's the nature of politics. Free speech was useful to your party so they defended it. Now that free speech weakens them they oppose it.

The same happens with the other team.

It's disappointing but predictable.

It's really easy to not be burned at the stake, just don't be a witch.

Yes, but it is not an aspirin. Before trying medication try therapy with a psychologist.

They will never be brought to justice, since they are another arm of the state. These groups are a way of doing what the powers that be want to be done while having some plausible deniability.

These groups are deliberately allowed to do this.

That same level of observation leads to thinking that vaccines cause autism. We shouldn't ignore our eyes, but neither should we trust them blindly.