Technically Caruso is no longer a republican.
1000x this.
Basically all of the modern conservative movement can be stated in these terms.
Welfare going to poor black people is the cause of outrage, while getting gobbled up by Brett Favre on a pet project is mostly a yawn.
A lot of people are going to spend many years in jail over arcane voting infractions in places like Texas and Florida, while Republican officials are trying to overturn election results openly and with impunity.
Likewise everything concerning Trump and the other Republican jokersâ legal status, Musk, white collar crime, etc. All treated with kid gloves compared to a black person stealing a candy bar.
Protest responses. Stand your ground laws. Gun regulations. Asset forfeiture. Policing in poor vs rich neighborhoods. It just goes on and on. Singular examples of things without in-group/out-group inequities are almost difficult to identify.
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This guy appears to be an MAGA AI construct, but they forgot to add panache and flair
I didnât know this, I still thought the attribution to Francis M. Wilhoit was accurate. The actual author is quite erudite here:
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It kinda does, doesnât it? Like, thatâs pretty much the way our hypercapitalistic society works.
I have no problem with most of this post except for the âlabor shortagesâ part.
If places want to say âImmigration is good for us, because it makes for a more diverse and vibrant communityâ, thatâs fine. I donât like arguments that basically say âwe need people we can underpay to make capitalism go brrrrâ.
And for people that say âbut even the well paying jobs arenât being filledâ, too bad. The free market is apparently telling you that you arenât paying enough.
Employers need to do better. Raise pay. Write your job descriptions better. Lower your job requirements and actually train people. Treat your existing employees better so that you have fewer positions to fill in the first place.
The sympathy I have for employers right now is absolutely fucking zero.
I donât like celebrating (even as a silver lining) the cruel treatment of immigrants to solve a problem that is 100% caused by greedy and entitled employers.
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But whatâs the end game here? More people every generation isnât sustainable for obvious reasons.
I always believed the reason California protects migrant workers so much is that they are a massive, extremely cheap labor force.
Life is a pyramid scheme.
The current status quo works great for companies. There are plenty of workers, but also these workers can be deported at any time so they canât get uppity. The companies certainly donât want the borders fully open or fully closed, they want a shadow caste of invisible workers.
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I literally donât disagree with anything you have posted. However we can both be correct. Employers need to do better. But at the end of the day we still have too low a birth rate to support our economy, especially as life expectancies increase (hopefully anyway, that trend hasnât been great the last few years). We literally need more people then are being born and immigration is the only solution. This is true for all aspects of the labor market including extremely well paying highly skilled careers.
California was generally quite hostile towards migrant laborers and their rights in the past. And during that time there was still use of cheap labor, even with official programs like the Bracero Program. In1994 California passed the anti-immigration law Prop 187. Thatâs something that would never happen now. Why? In 1990 California was 57% white non-Hispanic. Now California is 38% white non-Hispanic. California became a progressive state that no longer has Republican Governors and no longer ever votes for Republican Presidents and no longer passes laws like prop 187 because it is far less white than it used to be.
Re California. Grapes of wrath
I recommended this in the movie thread, but Salt of the Earth is worth a watch.
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An important nuance in this trend is that rich people keep living longer and the âblipsâ in the long term trend of longevity improvement are coming from poorer cohorts being disproportionately impacted by things like the pandemic and the opioid epidemic. The K shaped nature of the longevity trends is a big deal because it breaks the traditional demographic math. For example, in more egalitarian times with broadly shared longevity improvement, you would see average life expectancies moving up and more people attaining very high ages every year (which is very intuitive and natural). In the future, we may see more and more (rich) people attaining very high ages but the average life expectancy stagnating or even declining. Itâs a goddamned actuarial dystopia.
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I would argue we need to start rethinking our society in such a way that that doesnât rely on population growth ad infinitum.
Even if we do take the attitude that âwe need more people foreverâ, immigration isnât the only solution.
We could make it easier for people of child bearing age to actually have children. But we donât want to put in policies that might make that happen.
(Iâm not saying we should take a hardline stance against immigration in favor of more native born citizens. Iâm just saying we canât complain about not enough people being born, while simultaneously doing just about everything possible to make sure that young people donât have children.)
probably a nobel prize if you can figure this out
âThey indoctrinate children and try to turn boys into girls.â
Another great book on this focuses on the Sackler family:
Just utterly despicable people well before they got into Oxycontin.