UAE says four vessels subjected to 'sabotage' near Fujairah port

[Tom Kirkman + 8,860]

10 hours ago, Jan van Eck said:

Nobody is listening to anything they say. 

You have Leftists preaching to Leftists, and they reinforce each other, but other than the left press and the mainstream media, nobody pays attention and nobody follows up. Where the Left controls legislatures you get these Leftist laws passed, and the public reacts by moving away or out of State.  The Leftists are left preaching to themselves, and in political subdivisions such as cities and States they rapidly become insolvent.  But nobody is reacting.  You see no movement in say Chicago to deal with the public worker pension deficits, an overhang which is disastrous. People just move out.  Knoxville Tennessee is now Little Chicago, by the number of taxpayers from Chicago that have moved there. All those States with Leftist uni-party politics lose lots of population, and nobody sticks around either to pay more money or to work towards solutions (for example, California, Connecticut, Illinois, the three worst).  Those States are totally bankrupt by any rational accounting.  SO they go through election cycles and elect or re-elect the same people that caused and continued the problems.  There are no solutions.  I think the Left hopes that some seriously Left person will be elected President and he will do a massive bail-out, say several hundred billion for any of the three states I mentioned above.  I think that is a fantasy.  Not gonna happen. 

It is hard to imagine being more upside down than in New Jersey.  there the debt overhang is running at some $130,000 per capita.  Can that ever be paid?  Nope.  There is no plausible way that NJ can ever pay its bills.  All it can do is issue more debt to use to pay the old debt.  And that only works as long as (1) the rich people you are taxing do not move away, and (2) interest rates at the Fed discount window stay nice and low.  Neither of those two events are plausible in the future.  What happens to NJ?  Well, it follows in the footsteps of Argentina: it defaults.  Then crushing poverty will set in.  Stick around: those Leftist States have no hope of every paying their debt, and they will all go into default, and be basket cases.  Who pays?  The only possible solution would be the American Taxpayer, via the Federal Budget, and I just don't think that is plausible. So they become the New Mississippi - redoubts filled with poor people, and very poor first-generation immigrants. You will end up with social collapse.  But not in the States next door that have less debt overhang. 

Will the debt overhang collapse the US Federal Govt?  Probably not.  That debt is also not payable, but the Feds can gently inflate it away.  And they will. 

Remarkably astute and clear-headed observations of real life, Jan.  This comment and others in this thread.

As a moderator, I awarded you an "Enhanced Intelligence" medal; you can find it in your profile.

/ edit, dang it, something went wrong in awarding the medal, not idea what this error is 

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

6 hours ago, BenFranklin'sSpectacles said:

Is there any hope that destitution will drive down fertility in those states? 

The fecundity rate rapidly drops for families that move to industrialized areas.  It remains over 2.0 for one generation, then goes negative.  While California (for example) still shows some population increase, as Rodent pointed out above, the reality is that those new folks are from places such as China and the Philippines, not because of native reproduction or in-migration from other States.  And you have this large number of Latins flowing in over the Border.  You end up with a population that is less able to adapt to California work standards, outside of farm work and restaurants.  That is not promising.  

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

2 minutes ago, Tom Kirkman said:

Remarkably astute and clear-headed observations of real life, Jan.  This comment and others in this thread.

As a moderator, I awarded you an "Enhanced Intelligence" medal; you can find it in your profile.

That is most gracious of you.  Chalk it up to my seriously smart parents, who aggressively selected each other for the specific purpose of procreating.  Love?  Forget that.  It's the kids!  Amazing.  Oh, well. 

I do want to put it to work, in my advanced old age, so I have been working on a new project, to defeat hospital-acquired infections.  A rural hospital here is in serious financial trouble, losing $6-7 million a year, on the brink of closing, so I propose to have it develop this coating material as a new revenue stream.  Here you go  (see file). 

v. 2 How Springfield Hospital can be profitable.pdf

[BenFranklin'sSpectacles + 762]

9 hours ago, Jan van Eck said:

You end up with a population that is less able to adapt to California work standards, outside of farm work and restaurants.  That is not promising.  

What makes these people less able to adapt to CA works standards? 

[BenFranklin'sSpectacles + 762]

10 hours ago, Jan van Eck said:

Disaster.  The US economy is built upon cheap labor from undocumented immigrants - who also pay substantial sums into Medicare and FICA via payroll deduction taxes, and those would also disappear. 

To illustrate, I point you to the Alabama potato harvest.  Alabama uses stoop labor to pick the potatoes.  One season, I think it was two years ago, the ICE  [immigration and customs enforcement] people decided to go lean on the farm fields in Alabama.  All the workers scurried, with the result that the entire State crop rotted in the fields. 

And is is not just the stereotypical farmhand from Guatemala that will affect US crop harvesting that you need to worry about.  Additional to all those other crops, there is the problem of some 25 million Canadians. Aside from the ones that dress in lumberjack plaid and end every sentence with "eh?", you cannot tell a Canadian from an American - so they blend right in. Nobody questions you. Other than right at the Border, everyone just assumes you are a Local, and nobody does anything.  Canadians have been strolling back and forth across the Border for centuries and think nothing of it  (so do the Americans). These people become accountants and business managers and whatever.  What is ICE going to do - deport them all?  Hopeless.  Don't even bother.  Won't work.  Cannot work. The economies are totally intertwined, even if Donald says they are not.  I say they are.  Who are you going to believe - him or me?

I agree that loss of all cheap labor would be a disaster provided nothing else changes.  However, how does rapid automation play into the problem?  Some speculation: 

US immigration leniency is built on the assumption that illegal immigration is good for the economy.  More specifically, it's built on the assumption that illegal immigration is good for the elites.  Illegal immigration is still a labor cost though; when automation is available, would the massive financing costs it generates not be best for the elites?  There's also the problem of anchor babies.  In the beginning, migrant workers were predominantly male and returned home after the harvest.  Today, entire families are crossing the border and staying indefinitely.  Masses of unskilled, uneducated workers having children is a threat to long-term stability.  Would the elites not be concerned about those consequences? 

If automation is better for those in power, I suspect immigration law will be enforced where said enforcement benefits the United States.  E.g. ICE would be directed to drive illegals off potato farms because automation now exists.  The US doesn't need those immigrants any more, and enforcing immigration law directs potato farmers toward the correct behavior.  The same can also be done for dairy farms and a host of other traditionally labor intensive markets.  Even construction - an industry allegedly dependent on immigrants - is automating.  The few agricultural applications where automation has yet failed can move to Mexico, where the elites need not incur the social costs of their labor. 

What happens to all those immigrants when the jobs disappear?  They'll either return home - taking their anchor babies with them - or they'll be forgotten elements of American society.  Either way, they'll incur minimal cost to the elites.  The only problem I can think of is the burden they'll place on education & health care systems, but what happens when illegal immigrants are concentrated in specific, failed states?  When those states run out of money and the feds refuse to support them, will they continue giving so generously to illegals?  I doubt it.  Leftists are good at virtue signaling, but they've yet to demonstrate real sacrifice. 

To summarize, I'm not viewing this as a disaster so much as a smooth transition to automation.  In a way, the entire process has been good for Americans because they've been protected from job losses.  This is, of course, unfortunate for the illegals - but that's a risk they took.  They had a choice between fixing their own countries and breaking the law.  They chose the short-term gain and long-term pain of breaking the law.  I don't see how that warrants sympathy. 

Of course, much of what I just wrote is speculation.  Can you add perspective to it? 

[BenFranklin'sSpectacles + 762]

10 hours ago, Jan van Eck said:

That is most gracious of you.  Chalk it up to my seriously smart parents, who aggressively selected each other for the specific purpose of procreating.  Love?  Forget that.  It's the kids!  Amazing.  Oh, well. 

 I do want to put it to work, in my advanced old age, so I have been working on a new project, to defeat hospital-acquired infections.  A rural hospital here is in serious financial trouble, losing $6-7 million a year, on the brink of closing, so I propose to have it develop this coating material as a new revenue stream.  Here you go  (see file). 

v. 2 How Springfield Hospital can be profitable.pdf

Sounds like a good plan.  Has the coating already been developed though?  This sounds like something that would take years of R&D to prove out. 

Out of curiosity, how do you go about pitching these ideas?  E.g. how does one find the right people and then convince them to spend money?

[ceo_energemsier + 1,818]

18 hours ago, BenFranklin'sSpectacles said:

Perhaps.  On the other hand, it's been shown that birth rates decline when immigrants move to the US.  It would also be interesting to see if they kept coming after social programs collapsed and violence matched their home countries. 

The final question is whether Latin Americans would keep having kids if they had no way to care for those kids.  Up to now, illegal immigrants were able to find at least some work.  What happens when that work disappears? 

If they are in CA, NY, IL , CO and other similar states , they know that the Dem. Govs., and legislature will make sure their kids are  better off than US citizens, with housing vouchers, free housing, free food, free healthcare, free education at state colleges and universities and probably even free monthly salary, if we listen to the sound bytes of the Dems2020