But only if you get incredibly lucky. Even in the Bay Area where many an employee became a millionaire the chance of that being you is still a single digit percentage.
I know you mean well and want to save the world from trolls, but this is not a hypothetical. I have a friend who is in this exact situation (previous administration, don't get your hopes up for another story for your bandwagon). The parents had temporary asylum. They had kids in the US. Asylum expired and was not renewed. They've been fighting a court battle for several years now because there's an order to deport the parents and place the kids in foster care. They would prefer to stay in the US, but failing that they would like to leave with their children.
So you'd create extra incentive for having anchor babies in the US? At least the people doing this now have to wait until their anchors become adults and can petition for them.
But not all science is actually producing anything of value. Most universities aren't Harvard. A lot of labs do very obvious, very incremental work. They jump on the bandwagon du jour for grant writing and figure out a way to get the most papers/citation per grad student. Grad students themselves are mostly immigrants, and they are mostly there not for the love of science but because it's a good way to eventually get US work authorization.
In fact, on modern cars many times these panels are replaced.
If you get a big enough dent in a door, a good body shop will offer to replace the outer skin instead of filling with bondo. They cut the weld on the inside of the door all the way around, take off the shell, and epoxy a new one on. The body shop owner told me that the epoxy is actually stronger than the factory weld.
Hey, you can do a real-world test to see if I'm right or you are right. Go to a football match (soccer for Americans), find a group of hooligans and tell them their team sucks. If you are right and it's just petty entertainment - you'll be just fine.
That's right, they do not deserve loyalty. All of these things hijack our loyalty to people in the name of some higher-order goal. Sports team and TV show loyalty is there to get us to consume more. Loyalty to a country gets us to be reliable cogs in someone else's grand project. Loyalty to a philosophy gets us to be a cult leader's acolyte.
Skip the substitute and go for the real thing: loyalty to people. You can still join grand projects, but do it consciously rather than on instinct.
Remember kids: when Russia evacuates kids from a war zone it created - that's a war crime, and we put out an international warrant for their president's arrest. When the USA does it - it's a humanitarian operation.
It doesn't pay enough. The jobs in the industry pay less than software while being more challenging technically. The tooling is expensive and it's not easy for amateurs to get into the field. But mostly it doesn't pay enough.
OK, let's all celebrate King Bezos shutting down Venice to celebrate his union with his plastic appliance. The suffering of his serfs is necessary to enable this show of excess.
I think we'll eventually realize that this line of thought is the same as tobacco company apologetics. Napping isn't A/B tested for maximum addictiveness.
There's always someone to quote some dry statistic that refutes the lived experience of... pretty much anyone. I wonder, what's the deal with people like this? Is the point to convince yourselves it's not that bad?
Yes, indeed, in the US even a poor person is relatively wealthier than someone in a war-torn African country. But humans are social creatures. We compare ourselves not with "the poor kids in Africa", but with the business owner in the adjacent zip code.
As for "unrealistic" expectations: why do business owners expect to take an unrealistic percentage off the top of everyone's labor? What made them worthy of such a huge amount?
And that's a good thing? Sure, these games ease anxiety. So do opiates. Every minute spent playing addictive drivel like Candy Crush is a minute spent not exercising, learning, or bonding with fellow humans.
Like I said, it requires nothing more than picking up a broom. There are many places that are quite poor, and yet instead of graffiti you'll see a little old grandma planting flowers in front of her shack. And we should be supporting her, not the people who'd escape reality in a puddle of their own making. To say otherwise is so utterly deranged that I don't know where to begin.
I don't understand the romanization of slums. It's not about poverty. Cleaning up after oneself doesn't require a lot of money, but it does require a certain sense of pride. Oakland would not be any less diverse if it didn't smell like piss (the article's words, not mine). Don't believe me? Visit a predominantly Asian trailer park (they exist). But somehow to a certain kind of young writer the culture of decay is so appealing.
> I don't think capital has any special attachment to real estate specifically
It's one of the few things that are real (ba-dum-tss). And given that demand for housing is inelastic, it'll absolutely absorb any extra money injected into the system as UBI.
Put differently: whatever you set UBI to, it'll always be just barely enough to cover rent on a shack today and not enough tomorrow.
One workable version of UBI was Communism (as implemented in the Soviet Union, not in modern-day China). There you explicitly take the fundamentals like housing out of the economic system and make it a crime to exchange them for money. Prices of staples are tightly controlled, and excess income is to be used for aspirational expenses. It turns out though that it's hard to implement in practice because without a way to regulate demand - the supply side tends to fall over.
It's not a monoculture, but there aren't many places on a typical tourist's itinerary that aren't also 3-5x the price of a European, Asian, South American, or Caribbean destination. It doesn't make US tourism bad, but at a 5x price differential one may weigh whether they want to see the Grand Canyon or Hawaii that much more than the Andes or Malta. There may be underappreciated gems in the US, but the fact that they are underappreciated also means they aren't popular destinations for mass tourism.
It also happens to be ridiculously overpriced for what you get as a tourist, and in tough economic times satisfying one's curiosity about the US may not be as high on the list. But yes, there is also the political climate.
Yeah, and you can get the same evidence firsthand. Experiencing a banking app literally anywhere but North America ought to do it.
What does it have to do with Social Security? It's the same kind of culture that worships lack of change over everything else, and as a result it is bloated and slow.
State schools are not the kinds of colleges the author had in mind. The exclusive liberal arts schools with names you haven't heard and that produce a disproportionate number of government officials are.
It's less about COBOL and more about the culture that disallows any changes. Because everything is highly regulated and any change must have extensive testing, it's almost impossible to change anything about the original COBOL. Instead, modern systems like online banking are grafted on top as wrappers. If you think this cruft cannot possibly be more reliable than just rewriting the damn thing - you'd be right. And this is why countries that got computers into banks decades after the US are now running circles around the antedeluvian US systems.
The only way out is through and someone has to rip off all these bandaids. And while one is at is, might as well write this in a language known by more than a dozen overpaid graybeards.
What is meditation anyway? Is it like what the author did, but where you fail to shut up your mind and then feel bad about not being one of the enlightened ones?