china doesnt let you exploit workers

Oh my God, I had to stand up and walk around after reading that to catch my breath, as I was laughing so hard.

I think the average Ukrainian having their apartment blown up by Russian weapons that are jam-packed full of US chips smuggled into Russia might have a slightly different take.

That said: on the order of my preferred implementations, "remote-operable backdoors" is the worst possible one. *Automated* failure if the product has decided that it "has been transported internationally" is better, as it can't get compromised by an adversary or abused on demand. Better still is identifying smuggling routes, and deliberately feeding them - and only them - hacked versions of your hardware.

Define "scrape".

The general definition of "scraping" involves actually, you know, storing the content, not just briefly caching it then summing it up to the user who asked to browse it.

You really don't know the difference between a crawler and a web search?

An AI agent is tasked by a user to collect info about a topic - I do this all the time. The agent then does a bunch of successive searches, each time distilling the important things relative to the user's task that may need subsequent followup, and then ultimately sums up everything they found on the topic. What doesn't happen is "Perplexity building up a database of said content". Crawlers try to visit the whole internet (minus sites that tell them not to), a single time each, to build up a copy of the internet. Crawlers != web searches.

I cannot say that Perplexity doesn't also crawl sites that tell them not to. But what I can say is that if Cloudflare is calling AI agent seaches "a web crawler", that's utter idiocy on their part.

I'd also add two things from a personal perspective.

One, just short and straightforward: I don't think it's healthy for a society to normalize viewing women as objects to be bought and sold.

Two, and more personally: back when I lived in the states, my then-spouse once met someone at the local Unitarian church who had just arrived in town who didn't have a place to stay. We talked and decided to invite her to stay in our spare room rent-free. I had however never seen a person in my life so "broken". She literally would timidly ask for permission to go to the bathroom every time, and things like that; it took us a long time to break her of the habit. As we got to know her better, it became clear that she had been groomed into sex work in Chicago since she was a teen from a troubled household, and was trying to flee that life. Months later, she ultimately admitted to us that she just automatically presumed that when we offered her the spare room, that she would be having to pay us in sex, and was then confused when we never propositioned her. The concept of charity was entirely absent from her lexicon.

She eventually got a boyfriend (quite a nice guy, as far as we could tell), moved out, etc etc but she continued to struggle with - and I'm not a psychologist, but it sure looked like what I'd call PTSD. And eventually one day we got the news from him that she had run off, and her body was later found by the police, having committed suicide.

So yeah, my take on the sex work "industry" isn't so hot. I don't think in any way it should be "normalized". But even worse is criminalizing the very people you're wanting to protect.

I hate how the conversation always revolves around either the American Model - criminalizing sex work - or the Dutch model, decriminalizing everything - and the Nordic Model is entirely left out of the picture (asymmetric criminalization - selling is perfectly legal but buying is illegal).

The sex work "industry" is deeply problematic in a way that other industries are not. I really recommend reading the above article. Despite the claimed benefits of full legalization in Germany:

* The law's primary goal was to treat prostitution as a regular job, allowing sex workers to get employment contracts, health insurance, and pensions. None of this happens at any meaningful scale. They still avoid formal contracts, to save on social security contributions and reduce regulatory attention.

* The sex industry exploded and the price collapsed. Legalization triggered "unstoppable growth" and led to the rise of "mega-brothels," "flat-rate" establishments, and even outdoor "sex boxes", alongside a massive influx of foreign sex workers, with one punter describing Germany as the "Aldi for prostitutes."

* And with that, came a large increase in human trafficking to meet the demand. Germany and the Netherlands have been ranked among the five worst black spots for trafficking in Europe.

* The law makes it easier to open a brothel in Germany than a chip shop. Because prostitutes are typically considered self-employed individuals renting rooms, brothel owners have no real accountability for their welfare. This legal gray area allows owners to distance themselves from exploitation, with one stating, "That's not my business" when asked if the women in his club work voluntarily.

* The proliferation of the sex industry has negatively impacted cities where it's centred. Saarbrücken's mayor for example notes that the problem has become intolerable, with endless solicitation in public places, used condoms littering streets, and the city's reputation changing from a culinary destination to one known for prostitution.

* The exploitation of sex workers continues, in little-changed forms. The term "pimp" has been replaced by "the man," but the dynamic of control and financial exploitation persists. Women continue to find themselves tricked with false promises or pressured into the industry, only to find themselves trapped.

* Sex workers are left in a precarious and dangerous position. Due to the huge increase in competition, there's huge pressure on sex workers to consent to things they don't want to consent to.

Just a random example from the article

"She tells me about a 17-year-old Russian - let’s call her Klara – whose father had fallen ill. The family was getting desperate for money so when Klara saw a newspaper advert offering temporary work as a prostitute in Germany, “she thought, ‘it will be awful but for three months I can bear it.’ And then she was raped by several men the night she arrived to “get her ready” for prostitution. They took her passport. There was another girl there who wouldn’t do something a customer wanted and they broke a bottle, a glass bottle, and raped her with that. She was cut inside. It was shown to all the others.” Klara was trapped there for four years."

Or as the head of the megabrothel "Paradise" put it, at the end of the article:

Would he be happy for either of his two daughters to work at Paradise, the interviewer asks. Rudloff turns puce. “Unthinkable, unthinkable,” he says. “The question alone is brutal. I don’t mean to offend the prostitutes but I try to raise my children so that they have professional opportunities. Most prostitutes don’t have those options. That’s why they’re doing that job." He pauses and looks away.

“Unimaginable”, he repeats. “I don’t even want to think about it.”

There are all sorts of terrible jobs out there. Working say at an Amazon warehouse is famously an awful job. But there's no mass black market smuggling people in to work at Amazon warehouses under false promises, then when they arrive taking their passports and beating them with Amazon packages and forcing them to stay. The problem is that there's a gross imbalance in sex demand and sex work supply, and the more buying sex gets socially normalized, the worse the dynamic gets.

Which is where the Nordic model comes in. You suppress demand by keeping buying sex criminalized. But if you're worried about protecting sex workers - because yes, there absolutely ARE plenty of people (just not enough to match demand) who do want to do sex work - it's utterly insane to charge them with a crime. In fact, laws in the Nordic model have been repeatedly refined from the earliest incarnations to attempt to minimize the impacts to them - for example, shielding landlords from liability under pimping laws and things of that nature. Under the Nordic model, sex workers are given all of the power in the arrangement. For example, they can go to the police at will without fear of being charged, while their clients have to be careful not to overstep the sex worker's bounds, because, again, the law is on the latter's side. Trafficking has collapsed in states that have implemented the Nordic model rather than legalization. And as for the public's interest, solicitation moves off the streets (because the clients are too afraid of being charged) and onto the internet.

Also, just to be clear:

I don't give a rat's arse which party you support.
I *do* care about what policies you support.

** uncommon

Maybe not blaming people on a self-help site would have helped them not to radicalize

They self-radicalized long before the word "incel" entered the common parlance. Which is what happens when you create an echo chamber of a bunch of angry lonely men and base post visibility on engagement.

Why do I care what the UN's preferred wording is?

You made a false claim about the origin of the terminology. You should care about being factually accurate.

The correct and proper legal term in the USA is "illegal alien"

It literally is not. That term, while it exists in the US code, is incommon. The most common term in the US code is just "alien", and when specifically discussing the undocumented, "Unauthorized Alien". I didn't include a discussion of US code just so you could pretend it didn't exist.

And I'm sorry if you don't like being called out for wanting cheap, exploitable labor to pick your damn cotton,

I'm struggling to understand what your argument is. You seem to be declaring that any job involving cotton is inherently slavery, even if the people are free to come and go as they choose and are paid for their labour. If that's not your argument, then please clarify, as otherwise, I'm baffled.

Democrats want cheap labor they can exploit.

Democrats (aka, the party that is constantly pushing for bills for higher minimum wages and mandates for better working conditions, while the Republicans do the opposite, pushing deregulation) want above all a regularized system with rules and oversight to prevent abuses. Most also want a path to citizenship for people who work for a given number of years with no criminal record (7 years is a common number suggested, though even decades would be better than "never"), though this is secondary to the primary issue. What Democrats do not want is a masked gestapo kidnapping people who want to be in the US working, from in front of their children, and throwing them into "Alligator Alcatraz".

These things are the exact same thing that the immigrants themselves want. You can't sit here and pretend to be an advocate for immigrants when arguing for policies that they are opposed to and opposing policies that they support.

First, why not just admit you want slaves to pick your cotton?

I had no idea that slaves were free to go at any time. And if your concern is abusive employers, then the solution to that is regulation and oversight.

Undocumented migrants to the US go through great risk to get employment opportunities that, while terrible from the perspective of US norms, are far more than they have available at home. That's why they come in the first place. What they DON'T want is, just to pick a random example, a masked gestapo kidnapping them in front of their children and throwing them into something its creators lovingly refer to as "Alligator Alcatraz". They came to work.

Second, they are a net drain on the economy because they send more money back home than they add to GDP.

Asserting things flatly in contradiction with the research does not make it true. Once again, to repeat: the economy is not a zero-sum game. Labour creates wealth; it does not redistribute from some fixed pool. Their labor creates wealth in the US, but they are given only a tiny fraction of that. And on that they pay taxes for services that they are barred from receiving. From the pittiance they have left, the majority furthermore gets spent within the US.

Total remittances from the US amount to $98B; this is a mixture of remittances from undocumented workers and documented. Documented immigrants are vastly more common than undocumented (14,1% of the US population vs. 3,2%) and tend to earn much higher salaries (though they remit a smaller % of them), so only a relatively small fraction of that (a few tens of billions) is from undocumented workers. In terms of the share of the workforce, 6,7% of the workforce is undocumented and 18,6% are all immigrants combined. Keep these numbers in mind when you look at the next number: the US economy is 30 TRILLION dollars. E.g. the value that undocumented workers remit is in the ballpark one-thousandth of the economy, yet they're 1 in 15 workers. The value that all immigrant workers remit is in the ballpark of 1/300th of the economy, and they're one in five workers. And remember that it is work that creates wealth.

There simply is no comparison: the amount that undocumented workers contribute to the economy is vastly, by orders of magnitude, more than they earn, let alone remit.

Third, the correct and legal term is "illegal alien". "Undocumented migrant" is a BS euphemism invented by left-wing reporters to support a political agenda.

"Undocumented migrant" is not modern, did not originate in the US, and has its roots in academic and international discourse. It is the preferable language of the UN since 1975, aka half a century. Alien" is a perfectly valid legal term, although "illegal alien" is rarely used in the US code (the US has a wide range of alien categories referenced in the code, including "resident and nonresident", "immigrant and nonimmigrant", "asylee and refugee", etc aliens). "Unauthorized alien" is probably the most common adjective phrase, although just "alien" is more common still (for example: 18 U.S.C. 1325, "Unauthorized Entry by Alien"). "Migrant" and "alien" are not synonyms, and require unique terminology - migrant is much more specific, and "migrant worker" more specific still. "Illegal" is malformed terminology and commonly inaccurate. For example, a large fraction of people who are in the US without authorization did not enter the country illegally, but rather overstayed visas. It is also illogical to refer to a person as illegal, rather than an act.

(This is also a good time to drop a reminder that being in the US without authorization is generally a civil, not criminal, violation)

Also, just to be clear, if you wrote your post coming from a personal perspective:

Don't define yourself relative to others. If you do, you will never be happy, in a relationship or out of one. I mean, sure, you may get the initial "sugar rush" from a new relationship, but you will be doomed to destroying it due to overdependency on the other person for your happiness and self-esteem, which is something that cannot be sustained. You need to be able to find happiness and respect for yourself on your own.

But if that's not about you, then just let this stand as an aside to anyone who needs to hear it.

Nobody means "single men" when they talk about incels. Incels - to both the general public, and to self-identified incels, refers to "...member[s] of an online subculture of mostly male and heterosexual[2] people who define themselves as unable to find a romantic or sexual partner despite desiring one [who] often blame, objectify, and denigrate women and girls as a result."

To be clear, the movement did start as a website and mailing list that was basically just for people who were chronically single, but with no connotations beyond that (it was actually a woman who started it). But it morphed beyond all recognition from its founding. To quote Alana (who started the original): "It definitely wasn't a bunch of guys blaming women for their problems. That's a pretty sad version of this phenomenon that's happening today. Things have changed in the last 20 years" and "Like a scientist who invented something that ended up being a weapon of war, I can't uninvent this word, nor restrict it to the nicer people who need it".

If they would have wanted to participate as members of the society, they would have come here legally.

Oh wow, why didn't they think of that! Just "come here legally" - it's so simple! Please share with everyone your brilliant plan that nobody thought of! *eyeroll*

And FYI, "being in the US illegally" is only a civil offense. And your entire economy is built around the existence of these people, who subsidize your government paying taxes on services they're legally barred from collecting, and creating vastly more wealth than they're paid (which then goes back into your economy, because economies are not zero-sum games). They're also disinflationary, lowering the costs of goods and services. And tend to work in fields that have chronic massive labour shortages (ag, food processing, construction, etc - there's generally a huge labour deficit there).

If you want to know what happens if you slash production but don't slash consumption, simply look at what happened to inflation the world over in the years following the COVID pandemic.

the (up to) 3 million a year let in by Mr Biden's open-Democrat-voter, er, -border policy,

That conspiracy theory is (A) illegal, and (B) logistically unfounded.

Illegal immigrants cannot vote. In case that's unclear, perhaps all caps will help: ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS CANNOT VOTE. Only citizens can vote. The punishment for illegally registering or voting is not a slap on the wrist. It includes fines, imprisonment, and, crucially for an immigrant, deportation and being permanently barred from ever gaining legal citizenship. The risk is immense for the "reward" of casting a single, statistically insignificant ballot - not least of which because the vast majority of the immigrant population doesn't live in swing states to begin with.

To register to vote, you must attest under penalty of perjury (felony) that you are a U.S. citizen. Most states require some form of documentation like a driver's license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number to register, which non-citizens and undocumented immigrants do not have.

There has been study after study after study on the notion of widespread illegal voting, and every single time, it's found to be mythical. Even the goddamn Heritage Foundation's own database (which they collect to argue for stricter voting laws) shows that it's a myth. They track every case of voter fraud in every election, and all years together from all sources of voter fraud (not simply "noncitizen votes"), there's only about 1100 cases during a timeperiod were 3 billion votes were cast, and that's overplaying it (it's not ~1100 cases of ineligible people, but includes everything from vote buying to interfering to intimidation to improper voting assistance). The Heritage Foundation itself has only 41 cases of noncitizens casting votes. A voter is more likely to be struck by lightning than to cast a fraudulent vote.

And to reiterate, this isn't some grand conspiracy, it's because it's the worst tradeoff imaginable. The benefits for casting a fraudulent ballot are tiny. You have almost zero chance of swinging the election even in a swing state, let alone a red or blue state. If you even care about the election at all. The penalties, by contrast, are extremely high, especially for a noncitizen. And it's easy to get caught (registration requires verifiable personal information that is easy to crosscheck, and indeed is *designed* for crosschecking - see ERIC for example - then onsite against poll books - plus there's a ton of other things like the "jury duty trap" (jury duty is drawn from the poll lists but then leads to cross-referencing the individual)). It's like trying to hold up a bank to get a single lotto ticket from the vault; it's just a nonsensical risk-reward tradeoff. And on top of it all, the notion that it's party based... you realize that Trump had 42% support among Latinos, right? Latino voters are on average conservative and religious compared to the US average, and have been increasingly swinging toward Republicans. If Democrats wanted any block to come to the US, it wouldn't be conservative hispanic catholic men, it'd be college-educated black atheist women (cue the "This Is The Future That Liberals Want" memes).

Lastly, the "three million per year" number is itself mythical. There's 2-3 million "border encounters" per year. This is a very different number from people who are "let in" (except, of course, nobody is being "let in", they're sneaking past border security). "Border encounters" includes people who are caught trying to enter and immediately returned (e.g. never get in - the vast majority), individuals who attempt to cross multiple times (one "encounter" per attempt), individuals who are legally allowed to enter to claim asylum, etc.

Meanwhile in reality, undocumented immigrants in the US paid an estimated $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes - over a third of that to programs including Social Security and Medicare that they are barred from using. They are subsidizing you. They aren't "eating the food in your fridge and pocketing your paycheck", they're being forced to put food in your fridge and subsidize your paycheck. You live off the sweat of THEIR brows.

As for pushing down wages, studies consistently find that's bullshit - immigration raises wages for locals:

1) First off, low-wage work faces chronic labor shortages, and labour shortages undercut the economy. For example, the construction industry in the US alone is forecast to have a half-million person labour shortage this year. That sort of thing is devastating in terms of lost potential economic growth - the absolute worst thing you can do is deliberately make that shortage worse.

2) Secondly, economies are not zero-sum games. Work creates wealth. Which then gets spent and taxed, and that creates new value; jobs don't get "consumed", they just create more. Depending on your economy, lowering the cost of production does one of two (functionally) equivalent things as a net whole: either they lower the cost of goods and services (e.g. meaning your existing wages buy more), OR the cost of goods and services remain the same but wages rise. Or to put it another way: if you grow the economy in a manner that the lower-wage jobs are being filled, then that economic growth involves shifting everyone else on net average into higher-wage positions.

Furthermore: immigrants have higher rates of entrepreneurship than the native-born. Less than 1 in 8 native-born people will start a business, but 1 in 4 immigrants will. This sort of "economic melting pot" environment has fueled America for its entire history. Immigrant-started businesses have similar rates of success as native-started businesses, but are less likely to imitate and focus more on R&D.

Yes, many employers of undocumented workers are exploitative, but they're exploitative of them. The proper response is to create a regularized legal framework for immigrant labour. The reality is that the US absolutely relies on said labour for its economy and quality of life, while at the same time providing no legal framework for said labour to arrive and exist in the country. It's a legal absurdity.

You have to understand how your economy works. Your economic success has overwhelmingly been built on two things:

1) "Brain-draining" other countries (H1B, attracting foreign college students who end up staying with their advanced degrees, etc); and
2) Low-cost labour, to keep the cost of production down.

What you want to do is kill off your entire economic success model. It's utterly insane self-foot-shooting on your part. These things flood money into your economy and into your government coffers. And you want to turn off the spigot. You have every right to be mad about the low end of this being structured around an undocumented economy, but the way to fix that is to make it into a documented economy. You accurately identify a problem, but have an entirely backwards "solution" to it.