@woke8yearold Tokyo/Seoul have elevated highways, cities will build highways AND housing and it will be good (although Tokyo/Seoul do have more walkability than Chinese cities)
@mikitaposts Outside of New Mexico, the ~entire LatinX population of the American Southwest is from post-1900 immigration, almost all post-1970. In 1850 the Texan population was only 5% Spanish-speaking/Mexican.
In practice the American left is in love with a narrow slice of Europe, downtown Copenhagen or Amsterdam etc, that is effectively American level rich. So much of this discourse is about the inner city-banlieue inversion.
The American left is in love with a Europe that is simply, substantially poorer in real median terms than we are. They have no pride in the US, but dream of imaginary Copenhagen, intentionally ignorant (but mostly just lying) about how poor they are compared to us. This euro obsession goes back to Woodrow Wilson, their beloved, disgraced racist eugenicist forebear.
Working class Americans live very well by European standards. We can do even better, by being even less like Europe, with even freer markets and cheaper energy.
Our poorest states like Mississippi have median incomes that rival the large euro economies. The gap grows when looking at disposable income.
US expansion after the Revolution was enormously faster than almost anyone expected; after 176 years of clinging to the Atlantic seaboard independent America reaches the Mississippi in just a few decades (and California in a few more).
Presumably the only utility would be to elicit the emotion of understanding but then again with that increase in intellect the human will be even more aware that they are simply catering to their own egotistical need to feel relevant in a strategic calculus that is mostly beyond them.
But then again most of the most of the marginal demand post-abundance is going to be to satiate curiosity and so upleveling human intelligence is a way to artificially create incremental demand by allowing the brain to grapple with more complexity that the Von Neumann probes can then be tasked to satiate.
In other words BCI is just a jobs program for ASI.
The descendants of convicts shipped to Australia are better off than later waves of European immigrants.
They were select: they were mostly white collar criminals in a time where many people didn't even own enough to qualify!
JD Vance's offer to Iran:
Option A is you continue to behave like a terrorist regime, in which case you get quite literally nothing.
Option B is you behave like a normal regime, and the United States would actually, for example, let the Qataris or the Emiratis invest in your country if that's what they wanted to do.
Source: Allie Beth Stuckey
Same piece notes, "For much of the 2010s, pay in lower-skill occupations lagged behind while professional salaries pulled away. As immigration enforcement has increased, that gap has narrowed." https://t.co/60c8bWw4lf