So very, very many lies.

"Just "come here legally" - it's so simple" it really IS that simple. Why didn't they do it that way, again?

""being in the US illegally" is only a civil offense." and? As I said, Illegal.

"your entire economy is built around the existence of these people" - yeah, we probably shouldn't have let them flow in like water, eh?

"who subsidize your government paying taxes on services they're legally barred from collecting" so they pay income tax?

"creating vastly more wealth than they're paid (which then goes back into your economy, because economies are not zero-sum games)" - of which what, 80% flows to their home countries?

"They're also disinflationary, lowering the costs of goods and services" Ah yes, the famous Adam Smith maxim of "more demand = lower prices"

"tend to work in fields that have chronic massive labour shortages (ag, food processing, construction, etc - there's generally a huge labour deficit there)." again, chicken and egg.

"look at what happened to inflation the world over in the years following the COVID pandemic" not sure if you're disingenuous or just stupid. The US gov't vomited "quantitative easing" cash for 2 years. That caused inflation, the 'slashing of production'?

"II 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 (ad nauseum)"
Surely Democrats had a reason for leaving the borders open and functionally unguarded for years? Simultaneously pushing in every state they control to make sure illegals get things like drivers licenses. Oh and - 100% resisting at every turn the requirement to provide ID to vote. Why?
Funny how those things line up to point to what, again?

"Lastly, the "three million per year" number is itself mythical."
https://usafacts.org/articles/...
From 250k per mo mid 2021 to nearly 400k/mo end 2023.
And yes it's "encounters" in the same sense "illegals" are redefined to "undocumented".
Not to mention, it's ALL inferred - you know we don't have a list of the people who AREN'T CAUGHT, right?

Ah, so 'defending people you don't like' as long as they're the people *you* like?

Not at all intellectually incoherent!

Have you used claude code? o3? If not then you have not used the latest models. It is like judging a sophomore versus a seasoned professional.

LLMs however are proving much more successful than quantum mechanics computations at accurately creating designer proteins

Go look up de novo protein design. It has totally transformed over the last 24 months. Same for climate and weather modeling. These sciences are speedrunning from a relative stoneage to advanced predictive ability.

That the court later fixed it is indeed laudable. (Thanks to a conservative majority, let's note)

That the GOVERNMENT believed it was perfectly reasonable as a 'first move' is precisely what I'm getting at.

Nonsense.
Powder River basin (MT) has large, quite shallow layers of vast amounts of coal - that's why they use open-pit mines. Those could still quite readily be mined by hand-labor.

Oil (shrug) not really for the US, what we have is only really accessible through very high tech means.
And "forests are self-limiting"...you mean those forests that sustained temperate human habitation up to the 18th century?

The point is that - again, unless you get your wished-for 'deaths of billions' - societal collapse is going to INSTANTLY throw eco-consciousness in the wastebin. You won't get your utopia, it will be the 19th centurly all over again, with steam engines and roiling smokestacks pouring particulates into the sky.

Hahahahah.
An advocate of "Crash on Demand" I see.

The fundamental failing of eschatological environmentalists "if only society would collapse (and if we're being totally honest, billions of humans die) so we can all become Thoreau-ian Noble Savages living in harmony with nature and this time rebuilding society along the lines I want!"... is that you can't comprehend that environmentalism is a pure LUXURY.

If you're starving, you will cheerfully kill the last of that endangered Puffin for some meat. If your children are freezing, you are *absolutely* going to chop down the forest for wood or throw more chunks of coal on the fire because it's the easiest fuel you can find. You're going to build your town as close to the waterline as you can get away with because dragging your boat into the water and the catch (oh look, a dolphin! Yummy!) back up to your house is back breaking hard work every day and you don't give the faintest fuck that the sea may rise 1cm in 100 years.

Perhaps you were too busy being snarky to recognize the real economic realities in your cliche.

"No price is to high to replace labor"
Literally, simply, factually true.
It's called the Industrial Revolution for a reason. It too was about replacing human labor with mechanical devices. While it was disruptive and painful (and there remain consequences we are still dealing with), only the most inveterate Luddite would insist it wasn't worth it to humanity generally.

AI is - potentially - the same. If there are legions of workers* that can be replaced effectively by unsleeping algorithms, they will be. $15/hr x 250hr per year x 30 million people = about $100bn per year. That's asymptotically close to "priceless" to me?

*Ironically, as the industrial revolution was inevitable but was probably triggered/accelerated by nascent concerns for the human rights of the workers, AI/automation has likely advanced in corporate agendas due to the explosion of bottom tier payrolls by the push to $15/hr

It's critical to inject class warfare everywhere even where completely irrelevant?

Part of the problem is that "guilt" isn't a one dimensional metric, that you have it to some degree or you don't.

It's a vast, multidimensional, dynamic thing. Further, today, there seems to be a growing insistence that guilt isn't even solely a personal thing, but that we are told we must as moral actors project our contrition across time and space to others with whom we have no meaningful connection.

As we see in human society "what we are supposed to feel guilty about" seems to be pretty much the core argument, and, if the Internet is any measure, can even lead to whether some people consider others worth treating as human or not.

George Floyd is a perfect example. .
There are two versions of the same event, depending on the reductionist binary moral (political) framework in the US today:
1) a (white) (cop) deliberately killed an (innocent*) (black person)
2) a (cop doing his job)(following the official procedure he was trained in) led inadvertently to the death of (violent ex felon)(whose system was full of fentanyl)
Curiously... All the parentheticals are true. Depending on which set of parentheticals you apply, determines which "side" you're on and who "your side" allows you to justifiably dehumanize.

It is a great example of a morally-colored event where justifications of outrage and even violence hinge not simply on facts, but how they are presented.

*âinnocent" of anything justifying the final result. He was passing counterfeit $20s; I think sane people on either side would agree that doesn't merit death. One very tiny non grey area of moral agreement in a terrible story that has had huge repercussions.

Because it used to be that principle sometimes required defending people you don't like, cf the ACLU defending racists right to have their KKK parade, in defense of freedom of speech for all.

That you're too stupid to understand how that works is absolutely on brand for 2025 where 3/4 of the people seem to live in a state of hypocritical denial.

"Closing schools is an interesting matter for a different reason. It had never been done before, so the effects (especially social) were unknown ... "

All else being equal, I'm uncomfortable with (and every political sense I have is triggered) when public officials flex their " emergency powers" muscles to err on the side of the totalitarian choice. You know "for your own good".

This changes their role from public service and leadership (which is ostensibly why they were elected) to rulership (which we & they all kinda suspected).

That they, as the elite class, turned out to have broadly exempted themselves from their rules is utterly unsurprising. That in many cases their rules were made/applied in nakedly political ways (you can't go to church, but you can go to a black lives matter protest - I'm not sure why churches didn't try to game that particular bullshit) just reinforced my fundamental suspicion of upper levels of government and the self-empowering vermin that infest it.

In case you never took that course, the classical economist David Ricardo figured out that if you were a tenant farmer choosing between two lots of land, the difference in the productivity of the lands makes no difference to you. Thatâ(TM)s because if a piece of land yielded, say, ten thousand dollars more revenue per year, the landlord would simply be able to charge ten thousand more in rent. In essence landlords can demand all these economic advantages their land offers to the tenant.

All these tech companies are fighting to create platforms which you, in essence, rent from them. Why do you want to use these platforms? Because they promise convenience, to save you time. Why do the tech companies want to be in the business of renting platforms deeply embedded in peopleâ(TM)s lives? Because they see the time theyâ(TM)re supposedly saving you as theirs, not yours.

Sure, the technology *could* save you time, thatâ(TM)s what youâ(TM)d want it for, but the technology companies will inevitably enshittify their service to point itâ(TM)s barely worth using, or even beyond that if they can make it hard enough for customers to extract themselves.

There's a legit reason for nobody in Congress understanding tech. It's because the vast majority of members, including in this case Schiff, are lawyers. I'm an IT guy with a lot of lawyer friends from my college days. How this ended up being the case is a long story I'll skip. But none of them are great at tech at all. One lawyer friend for years had a "cell phone that's just a phone" until he grudgingly had to give it up and got, and can barely use, an iPhone. Another is very tech challenged. He basically just asks Siri everything rather than type anything into his phone and I can tell you because I've seen it firsthand that if he has to do something on a PC that requires more than 2 button clicks, his brain just shuts down and it's "too hard" for him to do and understand.