skystarman

Trump increased h2 and then banned them after Covid so he could demagogue about brown people spreading disease.

Seems an important fact that's left out here!

https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/president-trump-extends-ba...

But yes your larger point that Republicans are fine with migrants they can exploit for a few years as long as they can make sure they "go back to their country" is well taken!

I'm not sure how that refutes my point that there are millions of people south of the border willing to work these backbreaking jobs for low pay if only our government could come up with some sensible immigration bill.

That these same people also exploit undocumented people is a separate issue. Give them papers and you'll have no problem finding jobs!

They want more immigrants, and yet they support Republicans which massively slashed legal immigration the last time they controlled the government?

That's a certainly more rational position than believing your are smarter than the thousands of people with PhDs in finance or CS who pick stocks full time.

Any yes, what people on WallStreetBets are doing is gambling. Which is perfectly fine, I just wish more would acknowledge it.

And I would bet you a week's pay the "job creators" who are complaining they can't find people willing to work for peanuts doing backbreaking miserable labor are the first to claim "we're full, no more immigrants!" to the US when there are plenty of folks in neighboring countries willing to work these jobs and pay taxes...

And for all the shrieking about Amazon destroying "mom and pop" shops these people never admit that Amazon pays their employees much more, often 2x what the mom and pop's did.

Or did you really think mom and pop were paying the teens running their bookstore $17/hr? You think they had great health insurance and other benefits?

The thing is there's a FRACTION of a percentage of people who are "good at picking stocks".

Most PROFESSIONAL stock pickers don't beat the market. And those that do, a tiny fraction can do it consistently over a 5-10 year time frame.

This is backed up by decades of data. But we still have millions of people who apparently think they are smarter than the thousands of professional stock-pickers who have MAs, PhDs and years of experience and do it full-time and still don't beat the market.

And sure, many average joes were wildly successful with GME or whatever the latest meme stock is. Just as many people made a ton of money in the last tech bubble. Check back in 5-10 years...

I mean given this person's American history seems to be pieced together from Prager University Youtube clips and OANN I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't know FDR was in a wheelchair.

>So here we are, on the brink of war with a President who can't climb a flight of stairs on his own.

I seem to remember a major conflict in the last century where we had a POTUS that similarly couldn't climb a flight of stairs on his own and we seemed to do just fine...

But great to have some diversity of thought from MAGA facebook here on HN, it does get a bit echo-chamber-ish

Democrats are committed to the idea that politicians shouldn't choose their voters. They have fought in court over it and the SCOTUS decided gerrymandering is fine, even many egregious examples.

The GOP has always been on board with this. Why I'll never understand. The only excuse you ever get is "Dems do it too!"

As if Democrats should just lay down arms and not participate in the practice and let the GOP gerrymander every state to oblivion out of principle or something.

My Amazon Alexa has like a 60% success rate when I ask it basic questions that take me 10 seconds to google on my phone.

Something tells me AI isn't quite there yet to run multi-billion dollar firms and won't be for a while.

There are CEOs that are truly world class and transform companies and provide tons of value and are worth many more times what their comp is. They are the exception not the rule though.

It's almost impossible to know if you've found the next Bob Iger, Nadella or a John Sculley when you hire them. Of course with hindsight you can point to certain things but it's hard in the moment.

And for the most part boards pay people based on their belief that they've found the next Iger, not pay them like s/he could nearly destroy the company like Sculley almost did with Apple.

Yeah, I go back and forth.

I had a decent blu ray collection, DVD collection before that, I'm not that old and now they are all essentially outdated tech when I could upgrade to 4k.

I love the idea of saving the space that any decent film/tv collection would take up, especially living in a 1BR place. Then again usually when you watch "4k" on Netflix or whatever it's still not up to the same quality of an ACTUAL 4k disk would be played through a PS5 or whatever. That is unless you have crazy fast broadband. And even then I'd bet it's a degraded quality compared to a lossless 4k source.

According to wikipedia the population of Bentonville when the first WM store was built was 2,949.

It's now 54,909, but maybe it's 70k as you say.

Either way it sounds precisely like a situation where a giant corporation moved in to a small town. Or more accurately the tiny store grew into a giant corporation and so did the small town.

My point was merely that many small rural town mayors would love it if a giant corporation would move an HQ with tens of thousands of high paying jobs into their tiny communities! This is why the are willing to give giant incentives to them.

You make great points otherwise, thanks for sharing your perspective!

I don't think the comparison to sports stadiums fit here. Usually there is already a stadium for a large NFL team or whatever in the city and the economies in the cities that are large enough to even host these teams are WAY more dynamic than where many factories are being built in the south or midwest.

For example Walmart's HQ was built in a TINY SW Arkansas town. The billions that have been invested there by the company, not only in jobs, but amenities in the city have no comparison to any other option that was available to them. If the city and state wanted to hand Walmart a $100 million dollar check, then that investment would have paid off way more than 10x. (IDK what subsidies they were given, probably none just using this for sake of the argument)

I know WM is the evil empire and I'm not defending all they do, just saying that if the right business moves into your small community it can be worth tens, hundreds or even many billions of dollars to a community that has no other options.

Amazon moving into NYC, or Atlanta giving many millions in subsidies to the Braves for a new stadium? Not really comparable.

Us antitrust law has no jurisdiction over what Amazon does in India...

Again, how does this harm consumers?

Microsoft and Bell were successfully sued using existing antitrust law because they WERE harming consumers.

So again, how is Amazon hurting consumers?

The standard for antitrust enforcement for decades has been when the action of a company harms consumers.

How does Amazon harm consumers? I mean precisely, how?

Amazon is one of the most highly rated companies in the US by its customers. Its NPS score is 69 and 70 is considered "world class".

I can get almost anything online shipped to my house the SAME DAY. If Amazon sends you the wrong item they'll let you keep the wrong one and immediately ship you a new one!

How is taking action against Amazon going to help consumers? Seems to me that just ends up being a giant win for Walmart and target who offer worse service and often worse prices!

So how are consumers being hurt?

The EJ and Taupin collaboration is one of the greatest in pop music history, only Lennon/McCartney exceeds the quality and quantity of hits the team produced.

I'm sure it's not as cut and dry on every song necessarily but Elton writes the music and Taupin writes the lyrics. Of course EJ performs the songs.

Neither would be what they are without the other, certainly, the same as Lennon and McCartney's solo work was great but didn't come close to their collaboration.

Anyways just want to point out EJ isn't one of the "manufactured" pop artists who had others write his songs for him. He's a true artist and musician in his own right even though Taupin is obviously hugely important to his success.