Does this mean the Martian Council of Elders has finally figured out how to disable our satellites in orbit?

Will our gelsacs be safe?!

Where would we deport them to?

That will just mean media is no longer produced in New York.

When a man and a woman form a family unit and have kids, the old-fashioned natural way, the damage from any person having such genetic issues is very limited; most modern families have very few kids and even older families on rural farms usually had fewer than ten. No husband and wife, no matter how enthusiastic and frisky are gonna have 200 kids.

When people decide that we all live in a brave new world now where the old rules no longer apply and mankind can do ANYTHING and consequences-be-damned, we can end-up breaking-down those firewalls which nature had put in place over millenia.

It has been pointed out, by persons wiser then me, that often traditions are actually the solutions people taught themselves long ago to problems they have long forgotten. This does not, of course, mean that all traditions are good, but rather that one should think long and hard about the possible consequences of up-ending traditions before doing it. We humans like to think of ourselves as all modern and evolved and able to monkey-around with nature with impunity. Why, we're not like those peasants on farms way back a hundred years ago, WE have SMARTPHONES!...

The donor here is not to blame (unless one takes the position that the very idea of sperm donors is bad, and thus he should not have been a donor) - let's face it: if the screeners did not know about the problem, then the donor likely did not know. The problem of a bunch of women all getting pregnant by the same man IS a problem and would be prevented by the tradition that men and women pair-up to make kids instead of all the women in town going to the one most-handsome or wealthiest guy in town...

All throughout Western Civilization (does not seem to happen elsewhere) there are people (generally globalist and business oriented) making the argument for mass immigration from 3rd world countries, and when they think they are not getting their way, or are getting their way but more slowly than they want, they like to use this particular argument, which average people never seem to think to question. The argument is:

"The risk is it could lead to shortages of critical skills that end up harming [fill-in the national name] competitiveness."

It comes from the elites and it SOUNDS so intelligent, and so intellectual, and so concerned with the well-being of the citizens, that people just accept it as some sort of proven fact. People hear it and end up thinking "oh, I guess we need to accept this immigration so we're not hurt", OR "well, I guess we're gonna have to take the hit, because we need to limit immigration anyway (for whatever reason, like reducing poverty or crime, etc)". Nobody seems to ever back off and question the obviously screwed-up dishonest premise. A nation cannot have grown to (in this example) 10 million having all the skills it needs and then, if it decides not to grow to 11 million, suddenly not have enough skilled workers. It's IMPOSSIBLE. Such a nation has already PROVED it has all the skilled people it needs for a population of 10 million. If the nation in question has not suddenly grown to 10 million from a much smaller population by explicitly importing all the skilled workers rather than raising and education its own population, then it has already PROVED the sustainability of those skills by raising and training the people currently doing those jobs.

This mass immigration of people into Western countries is largely driven by ONE thing: The wealthiest people (generally, the investor class) need to keep corporate profits up (and thus the revenue produced by their investments) and with human labor being often the most expensive part of a business that has SOME cost flexibility, they need a way to suppress the costs of wages and benefits. Average workers often miss the point that companies do not need to replace all their workers with cheap immigrants to push wages and benefits down. No. They only need to bring on a few immigrants, or in some cases simply have those immigrants in the community, in order to get the native population to be too insecure to ask for a raise or ask for improved benefits. A big corporation can be raking in record-breaking profits and yet employees can be afraid to ask for raises because they fear being replaced by an immigrant who is willing to work for less. The people pushing all the mass immigration would not be pushing it so hard if it was not very important to them.

This is not, and never has been, about race/ethnicity. The people pushing it WANT everybody to talk about it as a racial thing, so that any opponents can be trashed in public as "racists" and "xenophobes" (a FANTASTIC tactic for shutting-down any opposing argument without addressing any facts). The pushers of mass immigration are very happy to have all the arguments be: "our opponents are nasty snivelling little racists" rather than a detailed exploration of how multi-billion-dollar empires cannot afford to pay their workers a little more so they can afford decent homes, food, and healthcare. They do not want people questioning companies who lay off people the company cannot possibly afford to keep on, and need to reduce benefits for workers, yet CAN afford to have a CEO paid more than enough to cover those very costs. This has always actually been about CLASS and power and money - the things that actually matter the most to the elites in society, and which they most need the public to not pay attention to.

Your reading comprehension skills need some refreshing. He wrote:

"Spontaneous combustion doesn't exist. Combustion only occurs when things like fuel, heat/pressure, and oxygen are all shoved together." (highlighting is mine) and you only seem to have read the first sentence of the pair. He was clearly indicating that things like combustion do not arise for no reason and from nothing, that somebody brings things together in ways that CAUSE a reaction (in the illustration, combustion, but in the general topic, reactions to immigration issues). You then pointed to two examples WHERE SOMEBODY BROUGHT STUFF TOGETHER AND THUS STARTED A FIRE and somehow think that refutes his point that fires (or immigration issue reactions) only start when somebody brings things together in an unfortunate way...

Your supposed clever refutation is the fail.

Now, as to the point he was making:

I disagree on several points, but will only say this: I think his "solutions" are actually part of the problem with modern politics. He says "Try listening. Try acknowledging. Try reflecting. Try redirecting. Try doing the work of actual empathy..." which is (sadly) the sort of thing modern politicians and their obnoxious consultants, campaign managers, and strategists are all too adept at faking. Bill Clinton's famous "I feel your pain" line comes to mind. The scumbaggery of the modern political class is partly that they have a plan of action their masters/bribers/"campaign contributors" demand and they know it will upset the public, so they go on a "listening tour" and they acknowledge peoples' negative reactions, and they express an embarrassing level of empathy.... before completely ignoring the people and jamming their pre-selected policy through anyway. It works for them because far too many average people get too impressed by the totally fake and hollow words and emotions, and like the distracted audience in a magic show, they miss the sleight-of-hand. The general public is too-often too occupied by their own personal lives and lacks the patience and dedication to stay attentive and notice when, weeks or months after all the fine emoting WORDS, the ACTIONS of the politicians are completely contrary.

We do NOT need more politicians pretending to be concerned and responsive to their constituents by a bunch of mealy-mouthed platitudes and "town halls" then ramming bad policies into place anyway; we need more honest politicians who will either say "I'm gonna screw you over and take the money from rich special interests who fund me" OR who will listen to their constituents and then NOT DO THE BAD STUFF. With that level of honesty, people would do a better job of electing people and then actually getting what they voted for instead of always voting for stuff and then being surprised when they don't get it.

With one important difference, this reminds me of the 1974 Emergency Highway Energy Conservation Act, which established a national speed limit of 55 MPH. States had to either adopt a state speed limit of 55 MPH, or else lose out on funding, i.e. get punished.

Of course, that was a law enacted by Congress, not an Executive order. I guess, traditionally, they say that for first quarter millennium of America, Congress held the purse strings because some inky piece of paper said they were supposed to, as if Congress could ever handle that much responsibility! Can you imagine?! Anyway, we've decided Fuck That Tradition, let's try something new and put a thieving tool in charge of the purse.

Oops, you shot down your own argument;

"Spontaneous combustion doesn't exist."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Many barns have burned down from stacking up hay bales that are too green. The can of oily rags is another classic.

It's interstate commerce, it belongs to the Federal government.

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.

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.

It's unsurprising; but I see that the law has several stages of dealing with foreign overcrowding if the 10 million line is breached; but nothing about how locally produced human resources will be stack ranged for headcount reduction should the population remain above the target. Surely anyone who really cares about crowding needs to have a contingency plan for endogenous losers as well?

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?)