h4nkoslo

Some of the things CA "receives" from the federal government are zero percent interest rates and preferential access to vast capital markets, a heavy implicit labor cost subsidy via immigration policy, an implicit promise of massive earthquake insurance, access to the Colorado River, copyright & patent protections for its primary industries...

Looking at fiscal inflows and outflows isn't the benchmark of who gains from a relationship and whether it is positive-sum.

If merely hosting a headline & link like this is problematic, you must also have an issue walking by news stands, visiting bookstores, or watching CNN. It sounds exhausting.

It's fascinating to see how the people pushing this argument prioritize economic nationalism exactly to the extent it promotes open borders, and exactly no further.

You also have a problem with precision. A test with a 100% pass threshold is a really poor estimator of an underlying failure rate; at best it can bound it, but you really do care about the precise underlying odds of failure.

If your system requires 100% perfection from all of its subcomponents, it is a shitty, fragile system. Robust systems can be made of parts with known failure rates.

And Hillary Clinton wasn't elected. As I said, imagine.

The disturbance you feel is likely at least partly cognitive dissonance at the idea of open borders amounting to labor colonialism.

It's an interesting idea, wouldn't you say? What are the effects of ensuring Sudan or wherever is unable to maintain a functional local elite? Are they good or bad, on balance? If we strip-mine all of their potentially capable administrators, do we have an obligation to administer their state for them, or just airdrop rice every couple years, or what?

The idea that states and people have reciprocal obligations beyond Maximum GDP isn't exactly novel.

Good. The entire premise of the internet is that it allows coordination at low latency over distance.

It's also probably not fantastic for the United States to be strip mining the entire >130 IQ population of eg Sudan and packing them into SF/NY/DC to work on ad optimization when they're desperately needed by their own people; setting up infrastructure to work remotely is a great first step to eliminating the brain drain problem period.

The traditional answer is various ways of forced community-building (collective punishment & reward, forming in/outgroups, etc) as a way of building loyalty to their individual unit.

Also note that in modern militaries, the ratio of behind-the-lines support troops to front-line trigger pullers is absurdly high. Depending on the country, you can end up with conscripts e.g. running the vehicle pool and doing logistics while the core infantry is essential volunteer.

No one seems to be mentioning that doing so would presumably screw over the NRA harder than Everytown. The target viewer for gun control content would presumably not be interested in an NRA ad, but the NRA is nonetheless paying to run it.

Oddly the "threat" is essentially that you might become ritually unclean by proximity to such content.