As usual, a challenge to the drive-by downvoters: answer the question. At what point have we done all we can? We "can" give ourselves as slaves to refugees to make their lives easier but I don't think that's what was meant. So A) where's the line and B) how close are we to that line?
I don't think we're really straining ourselves to handle the amount of refugees we are currently taking. That means, wherever the line is, we're not that close to it.
By what measure? If you don't know how to recognize when it's become a problem then it's not meaningful when you say you don't see a problem.
What is straining to you? I would describe our education system, our legal system, our prison system and our welfare system as all being currently "strained" so we must have different definitions.
(and to the downvoting crew, feel free to explain to me what productive disagreeement looks like, eh?)
I don't think the strain on any of those things is caused by immigration. If we improved them to make them better for current residents, it would also increase our capacity for immigrants. But I'd see that as just a side effect of fixing broken systems.
You've once again avoided giving even a qualitative answer as to what strain caused by immigration would look like. A first step would be admitting that it's even possible.
You've also made the mistake of thinking that just because you've found one problem that others must not exist. We can have broken systems and problems caused by immagration.
10% ESL students in our public education system should qualify as a strain. 17% of California's prisoners being born abroad should qualify as a strain. Are these numbers not high enough for you? If not, what does too high look like to you?
I've been letting you identify the problems because frankly I can't see any. California has so many prisoners it doesn't have enough prisons for them all. The solution is easy: imprison fewer people. Too many ESL students? That solves itself over time as they become ESL (or even non-English) teachers.
If you don't know what a problematic level of immigration looks like then you have no idea if you're looking directly at it or not. You're telling me you haven't seen any chickens lately, I'm asking what you think a chicken looks like, and you're saying you don't see any right now.
A 10% ESL student population doesn't solve itself. That's like a child thinking that their refrigerator magically fills itself when it gets empty. If you ignore that solutions have costs than yes by your definition ESL students have no costs associated with them.
I asked about the strain on the legal system due to immigrant populations, specifically the prison system in California. You said we should put less people in jail. While that's true it doesn't solve the problem unless we're going to change our laws to the extent that aggravated assault is no longer a crime. Then we've once again solved the problem by refusing to admit it even exists.
So maybe California has more immigrants than it can handle. I can't see it from New Hampshire. Anyway there are several times more people in prison now than in the 80's even though the crime rate has dropped, so I don't think violent criminals make up the majority of the prison population.
As of 2006, 49.3% of state prisoners, or 656,000 individuals, were incarcerated for non-violent crimes.
By 2010, drug offenders in federal prison had increased to 500,000 per year, up from 41,000 in 1985. Drug related charges accounted for more than half the rise in state prisoners. 31 million people have been arrested on drug related charges, approximately 1 in 10 Americans.
If the prison system is working at all we would expect to see violent crime drop as the prison population increases. There's a profit motive as well but we have to remember why societies build prisons in the first place.
Only 10% of California's prisoners have never been convicted of a violent crime. I doubt they all need to be locked up but I'm not seeing those prisons as being filled with peaceful drug dealers like the rumor has it.
I would guess in New Hampshire there isn't much of an immigrant population. I just looked it up and it's about 93% white there. My state's about 2/3's white, I live in a part of town where I don't walk around after dark because I might get jumped for being white which does affect my perspective. I have neighbors who immigrated from Mexico decades ago and still don't even speak basic english. I'm not saying my state should become all white or anything like that, but maybe we've reached a good mix and we could deal with the problems our hispanic and black communities already have because that's a challenge as it is. We're struggling to get them to stop killing each other, make it through high school and to read at a basic level. If we can't do that I don't know why we think we can take on even more people.
NH has immigrants but most of the immigrants have been white so far. My great-grandparents were born in Italy, and one of my great-aunts who was born here only spoke French until she was 14. There are still significant French-speaking groups in the southern part of the state. Lately my hometown has been taking in refugees from Bhutan. They don't speak much English but they are great neighbors and businesspeople. 3% of the population of the city are refugees who have settled since 2008, not counting other immigrants.
I think if it's working that's great, I support a cultural plurality. It's like adopting kids - if you're doing well with the ones you have then have at it. If your kids are starving and can barely read, don't adopt more. In my state less than 7 of 10 of both our hispanic and black students are even graduating high school right now. We have too many districts with on-time graduation rates below 60% and those are the districts immigrants and refugees are most likely to flow into.
19% of high school graduates in the US are functionally illiterate[0]. Nationwide only half of black males are graduating at all. Half. We're already failing to take care of our poor. We're spending a very large amount of money trying to but it happens to be expensive.
If you go back to the start of this thread you'll see I've been consistent that there's a point where taking in more people is no longer a good thing. That doesn't mean I think it's always a bad thing, just that we should be honest that it can be.
You are asserting the existence of strain and that it is due to immigration, so the burden is rightly on you to explain the appropriate metric, provide evidence of that the level at which you have defined "strain" on that metric is met, and provide evidence that immigration is the cause of that.
First, I think your intention is to silence me as opposed to engaging in discussion.
Second, my main assertion is the existence of a point where immigration is problematic. Example: colonialism.
Third, as to the side conversation of whether or not America is experiencing a problematic level of immigration I've already submitted the fact that 10% of students in US public schools are ESL learners. We can add to it that 16% of California's prisoners were not born on U.S. soil and they're so overcrowded the Supreme Court ordered them to do something about it. I'm calling these things "strain". I hope we can agree that immigration plays a role in both examples.
The price vs. users graph[0] is hopelessly wrong, dangerously wrong even. So wrong I can't take anything the author says about economics or markets seriously at all. I think they're trying to make the argument that Uber will achieve economies of scale but that would be cost vs. users, not price. Price and cost are different things.
The graph also implicitly makes the assumption that there are an infinite number of users and Uber has competitors. In reality as the number of users increases Uber looks more and more like a monopoly and the price approaches whatever maximizes Uber's profits as opposed to "free". The bigger Uber gets the more they become the government they're fighting against.
In a healthy free market price will approach marginal cost, but Uber isn't fighting for a healthy free market. It's the last thing they want.
> While zero car ownership will undoubtedly and unremittingly be a net social good—can’t wait until driving is something one does for fun, ban cars!
Can't tell if the author is for or against regulation.
People should get outraged when presented with outrageous information.
Still, this would probably be more appropriate for HN if it showed interesting statistical information like police violence per capita, violence against minorities normalized by population, etc., and presented it with a flashy interactive javascript chart library.
Your "partner" may have three other sexual partners that you know about but that doesn't prevent them from having a forth that they keep hidden from you because they know you'll flip out.
You're not immune to this kind of scandal unless you're in a sexual relationship with somebody and you have no expectation to be made aware of their other sexual activities, in which case you're not in a healthy relationship.
I doubt Bertrand Russel would be very fascinated by polyamory - it's just another concept that works great in theory but becomes endlessly complicated in reality.
"The psychology of adultery has been falsified by conventional morals, which assume, in monogamous countries, that attraction to one person cannot coexist with a serious affection for another. Everybody knows that this is untrue."
"There can be no doubt that to close one's mind on marriage against all the approaches of love from elswhere is to diminish receptivity and sympathy and the opportunities of valuable human contact. It is to do violence to something which, from the most idealistic standpoint, is in itself desirable."
[...]
"but I do not recognize in easy divorce a solution of the trouble of marriage[...] but where there are children the stability of marriage is to my mind a matter of considerable importance.
[...]
I think that, where a marriage is fruitful and both parties to it are reasonable and decent, the expectation ought to be that it will be lifelong, but not that it will exclude other sex relations.
A marriage that begins with passionate love and leads to children who are desired and loved ought to produce to deep a tie between a man and a woman that they will feel something infinetly precious in their companionship, even after sexual passion has decayed, and even if either or both feels sexual passion for someone else. This mellowing of marriage has been prevented by jealousy, but jealousy, though it is an instinctive emotion, is one that can be controlled if it is recognised as bad."
Of course piracy better solves the distribution problem, distribution is easy. Copyright helps solve the problem of artist compensation. That problem's hard but ask any artist* who isn't living off a trust fund and they'll tell you how important it is. If you skip the hard part by definition you've made things easier on yourself.
If the community of music listeners took better care of musicians then they wouldn't run to the arms of the music industry. Unfortunately music listeners want and expect free or near-free.
> It's remarkable that progress can be achieved mostly through breaking regulation theses day
Not to be offensive but I think it's completely uninteresting. Human decency has always slowed progress. Which empire obeyed the laws of the lands it invaded? Think of how our medical knowledge would progress if we abandoned all ethics, or how efficient our criminal justice system could be if we abandoned due process, how much oil we could drill or ore we could mine if we abandoned environmental regulations.
We don't do these things because local actors pursuing locally optimal solutions don't always benefit the group. In fact it's possible for the opposite to happen like in The Tragedy of the Commons.
IOW I dislike regulations too but they solve problems we don't have better solutions for.
*who you know well enough to ask personal questions
You're bieng more of a bully than the author's harasser.
Look at your language, you want to crucify people because they didn't destroy somebody's reputation and possibly their entire career when a member of your group asked them to? That's scary.
Are you saying that people whose career or reputation depends on not harassing women should be allowed to get away with harassing women more than others?
A great example of the right way to do things is how the BBC kicked out their biggest star, Jeremy Clarkson, due to a single case of assault when the victim didn't even make a complaint. It shows that they don't give license to abuse people to the more valuable employees.
> Are you saying that people whose career or reputation depends on not harassing women should be allowed to get away with harassing women more than others?
Not at all. I'm saying the only evidence provided from the author is a flirtatious text where the "harasser" was attempting to engage in consentual intercourse with another adult. Was it inappropriate? Apparently, but reaching out for human contact is a normal and healthy part of life.
The person I was responding to was fantasizing about destroying this person's livelihood and the livelihoods of others who refused to take part in this destruction. One person fantasized about a natural and healthy human activity and the other fantasized about crucifiction. There may have been some vague power dynamics in the (alleged) harassment but that doesn't measure up to active and aggressive threats.
The Clarkson sacking was the result of a police investigation and regardless of whether the ass-kicking was deserved or not there was a physical assault with evidence that it happened. Why we would even compare a woman having to say no in a clear and adult way to a man being physically assaulted is beyond me.
In any other industry Clarkson would have been fired for gross misconduct. The BBC did not fire Clarkson. They declined to renew his contract.
The BBC have said that they expect to see Clarkson on the BBC again. He was booked to appear on a panel show, but chose to pull out after public backlash.
The way the BBC handled Clarkson - a drunk bully - was terrible.
> Now their is a pervasive attitude - if you study engineering for example you pay 4X for tuition compared to humanities.
What? If you want to be an engineer you can go to a state school, work hard and pass the FE/EIT exam your senior year for 1/4 the price of a private school.
>> "...work hard and pass the FE/EIT exam your senior year..."
Mostly agreed, except that as someone who studied drastically, overwhelmingly too much for the FE exam (which turned out to be super easy) that if you have to "work hard" to pass the FE your education has been gravely deficient.
> if you have to "work hard" to pass the FE your education has been gravely deficient.
Easier for Mechanical and Civil engineering students since more of the sections are a basic part of their curriculum.
As an electrical engineer, the EE sections were laughably easy while I had to study quite hard to get enough points in the dynamics, thermodynamics, and materials sections to pass. I did well, but I really had to work my ass off for sections that I never used again.
Whereas practically all of the other engineering disciplines simply blow off the EE section as you can pass without getting any points at all in it.
Depends where do you want to work as an engineer high end RnD (ie real world leading stuff) does place a lot of emphasis on University, grade and who your supervisor was in some cases.
> ....for our willingness to put their long-term developmental and emotional needs before their short-term happiness. For our willingness to let their lives be just a little bit harder today so they will know how to face hardship tomorrow.
Isn't decreasing the pressure to be a perfect student the exact opposite of letting their life be a little bit harder today?
Not if the preferred way to become a "perfect student" is to go only after the easier/safer challenges. And to quit whenever the chance of getting any less than an "A-" grade seems uncertain.
The whole article builds the argument that since adults are only concerned with the kid's results but cannot be bothered on how those are achieved, all kids eventually learn to fake it and end up sacrificing their intellectual curiosity for the sake of self-worth validation from their parents/teachers.
Therefore, making the student's life a little bit harder today means to push them to tackle real challenges and making peace with the fact that they might spoil their perfect record in the process.
That's what the article said, no how I think things should be.
With my own children, I've never make a fuss about bad grades (which thankfully have been few and far between). I do care about them giving their best effort, and let them know in no uncertain terms.
But I know plenty of parents that are minimally involved but nonetheless demand "good grades" from their kids. Fooling those into believing their kids are raising academic stars would be extremely easy.
