That would require a slightly differently designed iSock.

These are not particularly exclusive to each other and right here in America we are in the middle of supposed "smart guy authoritarianism", the tech executives have thrown down to have a ruling class and government with "complete, un-challenged power", there's a reason the 2024 election has been called "revolt of the bosses"

That's what they are paying for, it's contractual. You're gonna get as many resources as you need to do the work you want to work on but it's for the benefit of the state, make no mistake about that. That's the agreement.

You likely would not be imprisoned for your science work so long as you were doing it as agreed. It's political extracurricular activities that are gonna get you in trouble, particularly as a foreign national.

Which country are you talking about?

And it's actually even worse then you think it is. Foreign students can and do get the same loans or sometimes better loans and better government assistance then locals. There are entire programs at major colleges that exist to bring people in from overseas who are basically already trained and ready to go, give them a little bit of specific skills that corporations want and then hand them over to the corporation to make money for that corporation.

If the corporation decides they want to keep the H1B then yeah the loans do get paid off by them or the corporation.

But if they don't keep them here which is not uncommon then the taxpayer just eats it

Meanwhile as an American you simply cannot apply for these programs. I mean technically you can but they're not there for you. I have had H1B coworkers ask me why us Americans aren't taking advantage of these programs only to have to explain that we can't because they're not for us.

You're also missing the point. These programs don't exist to educate those people it's just job training. The actual expensive education is done in their native country. That's typically where they get their bachelors and or masters degrees. That is billions of dollars worth of education spending that happens overseas where American billionaires don't have to pay for it.

That's the real cost savings. They can completely do away with 90% of education funding in America and get other countries to pay for it.

Which is a great deal for the billionaires getting tax cuts but for anyone who has kids and now has to come up with an additional 40 or $50,000 to pay for tuition because your kid is competing with somebody from India or even China good luck with that.

And if you bring this up the left wing will scream at you for being racist and the right wing will try to bury you in the algorithm and the centrists will tell you that it's fine because GDP go up and so line go up and line go up is always good.

So they end up living in slums. Cities have slums we just don't like to think about them. Occasionally right wing media will talk about them because there's a lot of Filth and crime like you would expect when everybody is dirt poor and being abused. Although honestly they don't even really bother with that anymore because they found they can just make shit up about actual nice cities and right-wing idiots will believe literally anything.

I mean they had a guy on Fox News pretending to be antifa who literally is the same guy who was pretending to be a violent black lives matter protester a few years ago. That is the level we are at people.

The hilarious thing is that the suburbs aren't sustainable. Even though people in the inner city make very little money and get treated like shit there's a lot of them because of how well, population density works and so the poor people in the inner cities subsidize the well-to-do people in the suburbs. Without the subsidies the suburbs can't pay for their roads in schools and cops.

It's basically an elaborate way to keep some form of slavery going even though we're not technically allowed to do that anymore. But again it's not sustainable because we are gradually breaking down the economy so much that there just isn't enough money to go around anymore. Capitalism is being dismantled in favor of a weird feudal system that benefits the very very top 10,000 or so people on the planet

It's no coincidence that we began the slash funding to higher education and actively attack higher education as soon as widespread Visa programs existed to bring in trained workers. Why would you as a billionaire want to pay the taxes for local citizens to be educated in college when you can just have another country pay that and pull those people over?

So when I was a kid the government paid 80% of tuition and now they pay about 30%.

Again, this is not a coincidence.

This of course creates enormous amounts of social instability from vast swaths of people who are cut off from middle class living and higher education. So yeah let China have that social instability.

The trade off is that America doesn't get those patents but I don't get anything out of those patents they are owned by billionaires. I can pretend that the companies owning those patents will somehow pump up my 401k but thanks to you multiple economic crashes and a handful of layoffs following those crashes I don't have much in the way of savings and I sure as shit don't have the money to go out buying stocks or the ability to risk buying into a startup that might go tits up.

Now would I like to live in a country where immigration increasing the GDP directly improves my quality of life instead of cutting me off from middle class employment? Yeah I would love to live in that world. I don't. I live in a hyper-competitive world where your entire quality of life is based on the job you get.

If somebody wants to suggest a viable way of changing that I'm all ears but every time I seriously bring it up I get modded down into pulp by people furious at the prospect of paying somebody to not work. Or I get a handful of libertarians talking about Ubi replacing all the other government programs and need to stop and explain, uselessly, why that is not going to work and solves nothing.

So if you don't have a third way I don't want to hear it.

There will be winners and losers but a lot of people are anticipating that when the winners come out on top there's going to be a huge amount of infrastructure that we get to take and use for things like heating and cooling our houses.

But those winners didn't go away and they are still going to be using those data centers to replace White collar jobs which is the entire point of this exercise.

That means we're not going to get all that free cheap electricity capacity. All we're going to get out of this is a massive Wall Street crash where they start firing Us in Mass to boost their stock prices.

We need to do something about that but we're paralyzed by stupidity, bigotry and an overwhelming urge to prevent anyone from having a happy life without being miserable a minimum of 40 hours a week.

I'm open the solutions but when I've asked the solutions people just bring up Ubi which is a pipe dream. You don't have the political power to push it through and if by some miracle you did the payouts would just be absorbed by monopolies jacking up prices.

Ubi is a classic example of a Band-Aid on a gaping wound. And I have not seen a single other solution proposed.

I do still see a lot of thought terminating cliches though. Although I think everyone is given up on yelling buggy whip at me.

If we spend $5 trillion dollars on new cities and houses and roads instead of replacing as many white collar workers as possible?

Remember folks the product here is not funny little videos. The product is replacing trillions of dollars worth of wages. The funny little videos are just there to get you to interact while they train up the AIs.

We are literally going to shift our entire civilization to one where a small group of people have their every need and want satisfied to the limits of human capacity while everyone else lives in abject poverty commonly associated with the worst of the American Indian reservations or parts of Africa.

That is at least the current plan. A return to feudalism. And I really don't see anything that stops it.

This isn't like when you lost your job at the buggy whip factory and went to work at the car factory. There is no car factory. It's entirely run by robots.

And as a added reminder 25% unemployment was enough to trigger two world wars. Yeah we don't have the same colonial militaries anymore like we did back then but we have a lot of economic colonialism that's going to break down. As it does countries will switch back to military imperialism to get what they want. Only this time we have nuclear weapons.

I'd love to know what fantasy land you live in where those are the only two possible stances.

There's a reason OP put "gang members" and "narco terrorists" in quotes. You can't remove the quotes around those without due process. So you either spend the time to determine if the person you're deporting fits those categories, or you deport them as "alleged gang members or narco terrorists". And if you're fine applying justice without due process to some group of people just because you THINK (or, more likely, were told) it's appropriate I've got some real bad news for where we're headed under that plan.

We'd like to think so but how many other things in society would we say the same about, particularly in fashion but people still buy it. Go into any mall that deals with high fashion and selling $600 shirts and Ballenciaga $6000 ugly coats but those companies are always doing well.

I remember so many saying the same about the Apple Watch when it launched and here we are on like it's 8th generation. Social signaling is very very strong.

Good thing when you buy an iPhone it doesn't include this sock? Nobody would argue with that statement?

Good virtue signal nobody was asking for though?

What kind of pretentious BS is this? Oh. Wait. It's Apple. "Pretentious bullshit" is, what, 90% of their brand strategy?

The biggest problem with Apple for users probably isn't any of their anticompetitive shit, but rather their bifurcated OS. Software which could be sold on both platforms is commonly only on one or the other. Tablets have enough screen and enough power to do real PC jobs but are prohibited from doing them because Apple wants to sell you both an iPad and a Macintosh. Android-based tablets can run emulators to get around these problems, or run full apps which can run on ARM Linux in Termux or another solution. TBF Google seems to have Apple envy and is aiming to lock down their systems more and not less so maybe they will throw away this advantage.

You used a whole lot of words to still be describing collective punishment, which is still a war crime under the 1949 Geneva Convention.

But do go on about why that's perfectly fine in the circumstance of a brutally oppressive authoritarian regime and how the "western media" got it all wrong.

And 10 of those past 15 years were under Democratic administrations that actually cared about environmental concerns.

5 of those years have been Trump doing as much damage as possible. Imagine where we might be without a 2/3rds effort.