Pronatalists are outwardly concerned with birth rates while simultaneously railing against immigration while simultaneously begging for more H1-Bs. The implication is really "we need more white babies" but always taking a back seat to "I need more money".
> Pronatalists are outwardly concerned with birth rates while simultaneously railing against immigration while simultaneously begging for more H1-Bs. The implication is really "we need more white babies"...
No, and I think that's a slander. If you look at the numbers, birth rates are falling everywhere. There's no fecund area pumping out babies at a rate to use immigration to solve the labor component of the birthrate problem. And even the most fecund area may drop to sub-replacement rate in a generation or two, if the follow the patterns of everywhere else. It really is a global problem.
And the progressive immigration solution is kind of imperialist: exporting problems from rich countries to poorer ones, who are even less equipped to deal with them (e.g. "let's export our trash to Africa and plunder its youth").
I mean Elon Musk is not really subtle about his white supremacy and how it dovetails with his calls for more babies. I don't think he'd even be upset by reading this.
I'm well aware that birth rates are falling in the rich world. It's a universal problem across all wealthy countries regardless of immigration or social policy.
I'm also not certain that this is some kind of urgent issue we need to do anything about. It seems like a natural cycle. And maybe we're better off letting the global population taper off.
I think you're also off base on immigration policy but that's a separate topic.
I once took two planes to visit a client office so I could do a video call with them at their other office on the other side of the city I just flew to and then flew back home.
I once did a six-month project where I'd go the office to sit on zoom with my team in 3 other cities. One of those cities was our offshore dev team that we hired because they cost less and could do the job remotely. How the hell did CEOs get away with telling us that offshore dev teams would be fine because in-person collaboration wasn't necessary while simultaneously saying we all had to be in the office?
> How the hell did CEOs get away with telling us that offshore dev teams would be fine because in-person collaboration wasn't necessary while simultaneously saying we all had to be in the office?
Because of workers who let them get away with it (apparently, including yourself). Workers who do not collectively act in their own best interests get taken advantage of, that is what CEOs exist to do.
> How the hell did CEOs get away with telling us that offshore dev teams would be fine because in-person collaboration wasn't necessary while simultaneously saying we all had to be in the office?
Hopefully those particular CEOs are now in line for being replaced with an AI.
Watering plants is also super easy once you do it regularly. You get a sense of how much water a plant needs just by looking at it and testing the soil (via moisture meter or just by touch). It's quite rewarding realizing how each plant differs.
It's nice to know the plants are getting the water at the right time when they need it, when the temp is right, etc. But agree obviously it does automate some of the fun.
The article says: US Government surveys are suffering from poor response rates and decreasing budgets so business leaders will have to explore other options to improve reliability.
This thread says: American Empire is dying and the world is a fraud.
Are all of you bots? Is apocalyptic cynicism this widespread? Fact is that most of the world already gets by with a fraction of the economic data we produce. We have enjoyed an incredibly high standard for breadth, depth and quality of data and it's now proving unsustainable. Political manipulation thus far remains a specter to be wary of, but there's no indication any headline numbers are inaccurate. The downstream affects on policy are equally off in the distance maybe never to appear.
It's suitably insane rambling nonsense. It actually seems to dovetail pretty well with Andreesen's manifesto in that evil is portrayed as anyone who opposed relentless technological progress at any cost. If you worry about the economic or human effects of tech oligarchs (Grete Thunberg is named as a candidate) then you are preparing your evil army for the final battle. Seeking to regulate AI also makes you a candidate.
This is the classic argument of "only Democrats have agency". 99% of the problem is Republicans, but here we are wishing the Democrats did more. They ran a perfectly fine campaign. Biden passed the biggest climate bill in history. Republicans ran an utterly disgraceful and wantonly malicious campaign based purely on lies and hatred. What I wish is that people voted rationally and maintained an iota of empathy and logic.
My position is: Democrats, or someone else, needs to field good enough candidates, and run good enough campaigns with strong enough messaging, to defeat Republicans.
What's your stance? "We should just ask the Republicans nicely to stop"? Will that work? What happens if they just keep being evil?
Democrats ran mostly fine candidates. I think people have really unrealistic if not impractical expectations. I personally want my politicians to be boring.
As to how to get Republicans to stop voting for evil? I have absolutely no idea and I'm not sure anyone does. I'm not sure why anyone thinks the Democrats can conjure great people either. I just think that Republicans are the bigger problem by far.
Voters still need to look through the barrage of miss- and disinformation, hatred, blaming etc. in short through all the shit the zone is flooded with. Republicans can if required always turn the dial further.
A principled democratic opponent on the other hand should not succumb to all of this, they should act with integrity etc. traits that also seem to not be pushed by algorithms nowadays. All in all I think it's a lot harder, especially when paired with short attention span of viewers.
They already did that - the Democrats are/were clearly not the same as the Republicans and that should have been enough (especially after we already got a preview of Trump's Republican party the first time around). They already ran strong enough campaigns and their candidates were already good enough. Most of them actually wanted the job because they believed in the mission of government, not because they personally benefited from ruining whatever office or authority they might be given.
The only thing the non-Republican voters had to do was show up, hold their nose over whatever bullshit short-coming their rep had (in comparison to "perfect" and whatever it is the Republicans offer to voters), and vote for whichever jerk had a D next to their name. There were only ever two options and U.S. citizens fucked up - through either silence (mostly) or blind support of whatever it is that's happening now.
Unfortunately I don't have any great solutions at this point, so voting with my feet seems like the only practical method I have for reducing my exposure to this electorate. Failing that - continuing to vote for the lesser-evil and shout from the various rented/lended soapboxes I have until something different happens.
D's need to figure out effective ways to counter the Republican bad actors, but no strategy is ever going to be enough, with a full blown authoritarian party in a 2 party system and massive propaganda ecosystem absolutely dominates the media and has thoroughly cooked millions of brains.
There's just no way to overcome all that every time, at the candidate level.
The right-wing propaganda machine, from Fox to Nick Fuentes to Joe Rogan - even to Twitter - has to be effectively dismantled or countered.
This doesn't seem based in reality. You don't go from majority support for you running to less than that and blame the other side. There are demonstrable actions and events that have a distinct link to her downward popularity.
When examining why someone lost you generally don't insinuate that the loser did everything right and the other side are just bad people and that's why they won. That's a recipe for learning nothing and repeating the same mistake over and over again. Which unfortunately seems to be the national policy position.
The biggest problem with her campaign was the one thing it was impossible to fix - the amount of time. Everything else is nitpicking and wish-casting.
And that's on Biden and his team, mostly. I do give credit to the party for actually forcing him out. That's a hard thing to do, and it's exactly what R's ought to have done to Trump a long time ago.
I disagree. When she announced her candidacy she largely had the election in her pocket. Had she run the same campaign for longer her support would have just been even lower. The only reason Biden stepped down was because the ruling class in the DNC made the call. The party voters were very vocally against him the whole way.
I'm a bit confused why you think republicans would toss aside a winning candidate. The party is laser focused on winning. That seems to be sadly a major difference. The DNC seems overly concerned being as milquetoast as possible and to simply assume a moral high ground.
Yeah really the take away apparently is that Democrats should just lie, brazenly, about everything. I mean that's what Trump and JD Vance did and continue to do. When you can just invent your own world to live in, how are rational people supposed to deal with that? Would people have reacted different if Biden and Harris had truthfully said "oh and the world is still fucked up because of COVID, electing Donald Trump won't change that"
It's a weird article. For one, the researcher says "they believe" the data belongs to IDMerit but apparently aren't sure. IDMerit denies it's the owner of the data nor is it any of their partners. And there's very few details about where or how they found this database. It's possibly some kind of hoax or ransom attempt? Or there's really just billions of unaccounted databases of private data just sitting all over the Internet.
The cybernews article does have some screenshots showing names like “idmb2c” … also that IDMerit was contacted in November and the ports were closed a day later.
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