Lord Ratner

A fond "fuck you" for this post. Now that I know what this gun is, I can't talk myself out of getting one. I'm not planning on the canebrake version, but it's simply irresistable.

Not really. But one that has existed over and over and over throughout history. We are in the unpleasant phase of the cycle. In another lifetime whatever societies emerge from this conflict will find themselves in another.

If they really believed it there would be martyrs. There aren't. It's just team sports. That means yes, they will cheat and lie and steal (just like in team sports), but until they are shedding blood all the talk of an existential risk to democracy is just political cheerleading.

Yeah it's almost like the Nazis didn't invent art. How many kids started drawing swastikas without ever seeing the symbol before? Hell, they are still all over Indonesia.

There are two ground controllers at O'Hare. .75 and .9 if I remember correctly. Either way, there's two, *and* a metering frequency. Are you thinking of JFK?

Yes, California does. Just like a medieval castle, outsiders are allowed to enter under the declaration of parlay, in order to petition the homeowner. Anyone under the protection of parlay must be offered food and protection for the duration of their visit, lest the honor of the homeowner be impugned at Royal Court.

I actually really liked that movie

Is the army really doing a better job? That's a real question. As far as I've seen the people in all services who make it to the top today are at best, morons, and at worst, hypocritical Yes-men. Although I admit I don't seem to see much about the Navy, so maybe they're doing better? It's very hard to tell if someone is good at something when you're not doing the thing. And we are not in a war, so it's pretty hard to pick out good wartime leaders. We are in a time of massive administrivia, and so unsurprisingly the military has no problem picking out the best paper pushers.

I was living in England when all the liberals in America were talking about a $15 minimum wage for fast food workers. I remember saying then that they were just going to cost a bunch of people their jobs, because at the time Europe had the self-ordering kiosks that had not yet made their way to America. Now you see those in damn near every store.

Can't be worse than Prometheus or Covenant.

You're kind of missing the boat here. By allowing for a claim of self-defense, based specifically on warning shots, the Ohio court has taken the first step towards changing the precedent. A whole lot of people recommend a whole lot of things, and many of those things are based on what will and won't be easier to defend in court. That doesn't make anything that goes against that recommendation illegal. There's a very big difference between arguing what is legally allowable (or what is becoming legally allowable, in the case of Ohio) and what is the best response. The ladder is also an opinion.

Helo dude posted the article, but this might be changing based on the Ohio case. Honestly it makes sense, once you have legal justification for self-defense, it really shouldn't matter what you are doing, if it is done as a means of protecting yourself. We are in a new era for the second amendment, thanks to the current Supreme Court. A whole lot of "you should nevers" are going to be reconsidered based on the new focus on the right to arms and self-defense

It's so funny the vocabulary the Air Force has instilled on us. Viable 🤣😂. As though somehow an F-22 of any configuration that can get airborne would not be viable when we're still flying C models around... We are still flying C-models around, right? Or did Big Air Force bring back don't ask don't tell? I've been gone a while.

Yeah, it's rare they make their disdain for the Constitution so overt. But this has been going on since the Wilson administration, so nothing new.

Hopefully they warned the social media companies before the Supreme Court makes a decision.

Bro, I got enough going on in my life that I don't need to also be contemplating my desire to fuck a bunch of cartoon Japanese/American hybrids wearing Bavarian attire. Anyways... Dibs on the redhead.

I'm not sure I can describe this as well typing it out, but when I was in Afghanistan we got a tour of one of the Soviet knockoff c-130s, and I asked about takeoff data. The guy laughed and pretended like he was holding the yolk of the aircraft, pulling it back momentarily before returning to the neutral position and saying "not yet." He did it multiple times, then on the last time held the imaginary yoke back to his lap: "Not yet..... Not yet... Not yet... Not yet... Rotate!" I kid you not, there were pine needles jammed into the wingtips, and an empty bottle of vodka next to a bare mattress in the navigators pod in the front. Different type of flying.

This is 110% exactly what I refer to when I say the globalization experiment failed. It just took 30-40 years to realize it. Cheap TVs were not worth the non-monetary price.

No, you just failed to comprehend what you are reading. Where did I say 6 million was too many? I'll give you a hint: nowhere. I did the math before posting it, obviously. I threw 2% growth out there as a target because it represents a high-water mark for American growth in the modern era. I also said: Now if the only way to get 6 million (immigrants + natural growth) is to import all low-skilled labor, then no, we wouldn't do that. Your nonsense about 6 million brain surgeons shows how you are not being a good-faith participant in the conversation. The world is not comprised of only poor Mexicans and brain surgeons. As I said: The balance of our population is equally important to it's growth. If growth was the only factor that mattered, South America and Africa wouldn't be a dumpster fire. I'd rather not adopt that model, thanks. Most likely the late 90's, when communication technology allowed immigrants to focus their efforts on reaching very specific locations where there were high densities of immigrants from their homelands. You also have a huge shift away from geographic growth, where decades ago the construction of the interstate highways moved millions of people to new parts of the country, and the immigrants were often the first to move. Now they are concentrating in major population centers or states where they have high density, such as the Somalis in Minnesota. So yeah, once again, things change. Adapt or die. And once again, when the Asians you reference came a hundred years ago there was a tremendous need for physical labor, such as building the railroads. Pretty much all construction was done with manual labor back then. Didn't need an education, and you didn't need to speak English. Yes, as compared to the high-school dropout native who will have a negative net impact. Could it be that employing immigrants for highschool-dropout-jobs is reducing the demand for highschool-dropout-natives? Obviously it is, by the tens of millions. That study shows how expensive the uneducated native population is becoming, because they aren't working. Interestingly, it also shows that the financial benefit expires after the first generation of immigrant. Their kids become a negative proposition. We can have a conversation about eliminating most Welfare programs for everyone, which I support, but it's a different topic. We can't just get rid of our unskilled native-born citizens. Redirecting their potential employment to cheaper, illegal (or legal) immigrants only makes the problem worse.

Just so we're clear, my proposal blocks out 90+ percent of the people illegally immigrating into the country right now. So the "landmines, shoot-on-sight, indefinite internment, light them on fire, whatever makes you happy and deters others" would be directed towards the unskilled immigrants coming from south of our border, who would realistically have no legal method of getting to the USA. Sorry, but there are more unskilled, uneducated people who wish to move here than we have room for (economically, not physically), and latin americans aren't the only poor people in the world. The millions of immigrants would have to be spread over a wide variety of countries and cultures, to ensure the disproportionate importation of one specific culture does not allow for creating critical-mass communities that are able to escape the forces of assimilation. The vast majority of those who wish to be here will simply never get to. That's what I thought. You are advocating for unlimited immigration with this statement. See above. Once again, comparing the social, political, and economic conditions of 1910 to 2024 is silly. Its a different world, and more importantly, a different USA with different needs. We weren't $34T in debt back then, and bringing in a bunch of low-income immigrants will not help that. And we don't need a bunch of raw labor. Your 20% additional income tax would bring them up to... 20%, since those making less than $40k pay no net federal taxes: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/18/who-pays-and-doesnt-pay-federal-income-taxes-in-the-us/ Even the additional 20%, which you know will never happen, would not do anything to fix our budget. So aside from not being able to effectively join the American community if you can't speak to Americans, you will never see meaningful numbers of immigrants make enough money to make their admission to the country worthwhile if they can't speak English.

And here is your strawman. Who here doesn't want this? It's never been the issue. The issue is "how many." You will n.e.v.e.r. see a democrat (or for that matter, any conventional republican) come within 1,000 miles of that question, yet it is the single most important question in any discussion about immigration. How many, and who? I will submit that the answer should be something like: How many --> (2% - (Natural population growth rate)). So if Americans are having enough kids to give us 2% or more annual population growth, then no immigration. Otherwise, fill in the shortfall. Population growth needs to be high enough to keep the economy growing, but stable enough to avoid huge swings in generational size. You can't have absolute control over that, but immigration can be used as a buffering force. Adjust the 2% number to better fit desired growth patterns. Who --> Look at what skill class and income strata is trailing, and target that. We have a huge surplus of low-skilled Americans (and illegals already here). So the 50,000 lottery and family allowance is more than enough right now, as I said: Nonsense. This is another strawman. It was a swell idea when the American economy was overwhelmingly labor based, in addition to the realities of welfare and medical benefits that are free to anyone who exists within out borders. But we are now a services economy, and the need for young, uneducated, unskilled men is much, much lower than it was in the past. The easy answer to that is to only import immigrants with high-skill backgrounds, but as I asked before, what does that do to the countries we, the global police, want to advance into the modern world? They need doctors and engineers more than we do. Same as before, this is a throwaway question. How many, and who? We absolutely do not. "Crappy job" is a function of (Pay) / (Suck factor). Importing a metric shit ton of low skilled labor artificially depresses the wages of high-suck-factor jobs. The problem is that we have plenty of Americans who are only really capable of performing those jobs. If they are undercut by illegal immigrants, they simply don't work, and since we are a welfare-supportive country, that's another ward of the state we all get to pay for. If you can't find enough people willing to pick strawberries or build fences, you either need to pay more for the work or develop technology that eliminates the need for human labor. Digging ditches, for example; now a single excavator can do the work of hundreds of men with shovels. Using desperate Mexicans to do the work just distorts the usual economic pressures. When we have near-zero able-bodied Americans without jobs (voluntarily or involuntarily), then we can start importing unskilled labor en masse, because there will be a real, not an artificial need. All of this is economic based. This also ignores the reality that we should not allow anyone who can't speak English to immigrate in (unless they are a familial import). We can not build an integrated society if the new citizens are incapable of communicating with the "legacy Americans." It is bad socially, and it is bad functionally, when you have to waste resources on translation services at nearly every level of government. I don't want to pile on you specifically, because I find most people on both sides are making completely hollow arguments. But you have demonstrated quite well why the issue goes nowhere. You injected a ton of righteous morality into your responses, yet you have proposed nothing actionable. Your preferred solution is not clear from your posts, but it sounds like you want to simply formalize the in-processing of the people who are currently coming in illegally. That does zero to address the actual problem.

Let's start with Emergency Medicaid. Also school meal programs. Pregnant women and young kids get WIC access. Free room and board in certain cities. You think a mother living in Haiti is more worried about rapists and murderers in Mexico than the rapists and murders she has to endure if she stays in Haiti? States seems to be struggling: https://wpde.com/news/nation-world/denver-hospital-system-may-collapse-due-to-migrant-crisis-we-are-turning-down-patients-southern-border-trump-biden-colorado-denver-health-post-donna-lynne-immigrants-illegal-migrants-asylum-seekers-resources What country do you live in that you think this is anything like the 1950s? And if the burden of illegal immigration is so low, why are the Blue Cities in the north melting down over 5-digit inflows of aliens being sent to them by Florida and Texas? What demand? There was demand for dirt cheap consumer goods from China, and that 30 year experiment decimated the American middle class and industrial base. The short term price suppression of cheap foreign labor is not worth the long term disruption to the economic balance of the society. And through all of this everyone ignores the effect on the originating country. What hope do these countries have of pulling out of the 3rd-world death spiral if their hardest workers and strongest men all flee to the US? Is cheaper lettuce and construction labor really worth the long term impact of having an entire continent of heavily populated, unstable countries perpetually feeding low/no skill workers to our southern border? Do you believe that the United States can handle the addition of... 100,000,000 low-skill immigrants? Because there are far more who wish to be here. Exactly how does that play out?

Shack. If we're ready to go back to letting people die of starvation and sickness if they have no money, consider me an open-borders supporter. Until then, zero low skilled immigration. We will get all the low-skilled immigrants we need from the families of the high-skilled workers we grant citizenship to, and the 20-30 million we have already let in.

Yeah, between that and his defense of Israel I suspect there are a lot of (even more) unhappy progressives.

I actually mentioned that to my wife. I know it's normal that each era has a tone and inflection that all public speakers adopt, which is why all the radio people from the twenties and thirties sounded so hilarious, but I really hate this current era of shouting with frequent, inappropriately placed pauses. It makes it sound like the people speaking are idiots who don't believe what they're saying, which is pretty fitting. The