Well, I'll have to admit, I didn't have "learning that someone on Slashdot believes that the Cold War was a myth" on my bingo card for today.

You seem to be confusing "wanting to get rid of communists" with "wanting their countries to be poor and dangerous".

It's not just Germany. Most of Western Europe has been trending this way since the end of the Cold War, and the roots of such thinking were there long before Hitler was even an itch in his daddy's pants. A lot of Americans seem surprised by this. But Europe isn't America, and European governments have always had a more paternalistic view of their role than American political philosophy allows for. Further, most Europeans are fine with that. Americans gasp when they see such things, but this is just the latest line of code in the old European We'll keep you all safe, comfy, and warm under the blanket of *insert European capitol here* script. European thinking sees the welfare of their people in totality. So it's not just social welfare you get from such systems... "free" healthcare, subsidized housing, schools, etc... but you also get the rest of the "protection" philosophy... that you have to protect people from themselves. Speech codes, bans on anything the government deems "extreme", they're all part of the paternalistic view that you're protecting and providing for your people. Father's job is to feed, house, and keep the kids safe. Part of that is disciplining and setting rules that they have to follow, for their own good. With a few exceptions, this is No Bueno is most of North America, but again, Europe isn't America. It has a considerably different mindset.

Did you even RTFA?

"Our analysis takes advantage of administrative data from a large, urban, public college system "

The analysts are from Columbia, a private Ivy League school. Not the students. Since they're NYC based, the students they were studying were almost certainly from the public City University of New York system. Not at all hard to get into, and no need for "nepo baby" admissions.

There was a movie called Kill the Irishman, starring the late great Ray Stevenson, that had a similar plot point: Danny Greene borrows money from the Mob to start a restaurant. The courier tasked with delivering the cash decides to take it and buy heroin with it, re-sell it at a profit, and keep the difference for himself. Except the sellers are Feds in a honeypot scheme. The money is gone, the Mob demands Greene pay them back, he refuses, so the order goes out to "kill the Irishman".

Ugh. Was it Adecco?

I wanted to stay contractor if I couldn't become a FTE, but I was told that there was a 1.5 yrs limit. :(

Microsoft could be making a killing on ex-VMware customers if they would just improve their management tools on Hyper-V. That keeps a lot of enterprise customers away. MS's management software for VM's is barebones compared to what VMware offers. But Broadcom seems determined to dare their customers to leave. They're pretty arrogant because they're confident most of their customers will pay the bigger bill instead of jumping to a far-less feature-rich solution.

USAID was horrifically corrupt

The cuts to USAID are projected to cause 14 million extra deaths - a large minority of those children - by 2030. And USAID engendered massive goodwill among its recipients

But no, by all means kill a couple million people per year and worsen living conditions (creating more migration) in order to save $23 per person, that's clearly Very Smart(TM).

And I don't know how to inform you of this, but the year is now 2025 and the Cold War and the politics therein ended nearly four decades ago. And USAID was not created "to smuggle CIA officers" (though CIA offers used every means available to them to do their work, certainly), it was created as a counterbalance to the USSR's use of similar soft power to turn the Third World to *its* side.

They can go back at any point if they don't think the conditions and salaries offered are worth the job. What matters is that they remain free to leave, with no "catches" keeping them there (inability to get return transport, inability to communicate with the outside world, misinformation, etc etc). Again, there's a debate to have over what conditions should be mandated by regulation, but the key point is that the salary offered - like happens illegally today en masse - is lower than US standards but higher than what they can get at home.

What on Earth are you talking about? Nobody is trying to make other countries poor and dangerous. People come to the US from these countries because even jobs that are tough and underpaid by US standards are vastly better than what is available at home. Creating a formal system just eliminates the worst aspects of it: the lawlessness, the sneaking across the border in often dangerous conditions (swimming across rivers, traveling through deserts), "coyotes" smuggling people in terrible conditions, and so forth. The current US system is the dumbest way you could possibly handle it: people wanting to work, US employers wanting them, the US economy benefitting from it... but still making it illegal, chaotic, dangerous, and unregulated for those involved.

Isn't that the point with things like this? Since I don't have any Facebook/X/etc. accounts, that, and all the other similar online forum sites, is *exactly* what they would get were I ever to visit the US (which is not likely given they seem to be competing with social media to see who can rape the most of my personal data). I also have a wildcarded email domain with different addresses for different companies and a whole bunch of mailing lists that have been around for decades, so they can have a copy of my aliases table too. If whichever poor bastards get to look at it don't need therapy after trawling through all the AC-posted crap and inane flamewars in all that, then I'll be amazed. And as for finding anything I've overlooked and proving it was deliberate concealment... Yeah. Good luck with that!

I would need to see if if you can submit a GDPR request to a federal agency but, if so, then following up with one of those asking for a copy of everything they have on file after getting back home (assuming they approved my visit in the first place after yanking their chain with the above) could be entertaining too. Probably ensure an instant blackball on any future visits, but still - ROFLMFAO! In fact, come to think of it, I might just plan a short trip somewhere in the US just for the Lulz if this ever comes to pass.

Also, point of note: it's unlikely you'd actually grow plants and humans in interconnected habitats anyway. You might pump some gases from one to the next, but: agriculture takes up lots of area / volume. If you're talking Mars rather than Venus, then you're talking large pressure vessels, which is a lot of mass, proportional to the pressure differential. Which is expensive. But plants tolerate living at much lower pressures than humans (and there's potential to engineer / breed them to tolerate even lower - the main problems are that they mistake low pressure for drought, and that's a response we can manipulate). So it makes much more sense to grow them in large, low-pressure structures with a mostly-CO2 / some O2 / no N2 atmosphere, rather than at human-comfortable pressure levels.

That said, you don't want human workers having to work in pressure suits, so ideally you'd use a sliding tray system (we use them on Earth to save space in greenhouses) or similar, except that you'd move the plants through an airlock into a human-comfortable area for any non-mechanized work. Obviously, mechanized systems can operate at any pressure level, and also obviously, some work would still need to be done in pressure suits every now and again (maintenance, cleaning, etc).

None of this applies to a floating Venus habitat, where in your typical Landis design your crew - and potentially agriculture - are just living in your lifting envelope, at normal pressures. The envelope is massive, so you have no shortage of space for agriculture, all well-illuminated from all angles if the envelope is transparent. The challenges there are different - how to support them, humidity management, water supply, falling debris, etc.

If only the US had some sort of aid program designed to try to make conditions more favourable in the sort of countries that economic migrants tend to flee from. Maybe the US could call it "US Aid" or something, and give it a decent budget rather than gutting it to save $23 per American.

But the main issue is that the proper solution is obviously to have a formal, controlled, actually viable work visa system for economic migrants, distinct from asylum. The US economy is immensely boosted by millions of (generally awful) jobs being done by illegal immigrants at substandard wages (which are still vastly more than they could get at home), making US goods far more competitive than they would otherwise be and pumping huge sums of money into the economy. Formalize it. Basic worker protections but not the minimum wages or benefits that citizens get. You drop off an application for a sponsoring company, and so long as you're employed with them and not causing problems, you can stay. Fired, laid off, or quit, and you go back to your country (where you can reapply for a different job). You can also promote maquiladoras, wherein immigrants are also working for your companies, but the labour is being done across the border (but the goods move freely without tariffs, so it's like having the work done in your country).

(I find it hilarious hearing people like Vance talking about how he'll bring housing costs down by kicking out immigrants, freeing up housing. Um, dude, exactly who do you think it is that builds the housing in much of the US?)

"Refugee papers" OMG I'm dying here...