Cheap labour producing goods for the native population at low costs should increase your standard of living, no? It makes the products you buy cheaper.

By your logic, if you were the only person in the country, you'd live like a king.

Companies are importing labor so they can avoid pay competitive wages to native workers. If you need to hire people from other countries they should have the same pay and protections as everyone else.

Cheaper goods in exchange for losing your well-paying job is an awful deal for the one who lost the job.

That's way too naive, prices never go down, the owner pockets the difference, you pay the same, and once they come to your industry you have more competition

Tbf, if I was the only person in the country, no one would stop me of being the actual king.

By your logic, slavery was one of the finest economic policies. Cheap labour, how about free labour? Have we thought of that? Everything would just be free.

In the real world, the evidence is obvious: average productivity/wages drop, incentive to invest in labour-saving technology disappears, and you get multiple decades of stagnation. Every country which had unlimited, unfree labour has had decades of slow growth as a result.

Income growth in the working age population in the US since 1990 has been about the same as Japan, a country which is widely regarded as on the verge of economic collapse. US per capita income is probably 20-30% lower than it would be with first-order effects from immigration, likely much more with second order effects. Under any other circumstances with economic policy elsewhere, the US economy would be growing 7%/year now (and ofc, the answer for Japan's ills is apparently, you guessed, lots of immigration).

China is seeing secular reductions in production costs because of capital investment, not low wages. The peculiarly statist notion of American capitalists that the route to economic supremacy was large numbers of illiterate Guatemalans should go down as not only an economic failure but a moral one (equally of H1B).

I think they're confused/disingenuous and talking about the _marginal_ tax rate at 100k.

There's a segment of a few thousand pounds where your marginal tax rate skyrockets because you lose your tax free allowance at that income level.

It's stupid, annoying and has some minor economic effects, but it's very different from a 71% income tax rate.

It was a rhetorical question, of course they were being disingenuous. Marginal tax rate doesn't have the same ring as 70% tax.

I'll know it when I see it

xAI's value is irrelevant here. This is about Elon throwing his weight around and rigging the game to create an artificial squeeze so him and his early investors can make bank by transferring wealth from everyone's retirement fund.

The company is irrelevant. The focus should be on the money making scheme

Your punishment is that you will now have to follow the rules

Or just do it a different way until they get caught again.

> regardless of election outcome, the next government is highly unlikely to roll this back

Well yes, it’s not a high priority. I’m not going to bring it up with my electeds. Are you? If everyone who thinks this is a huge deal is too lazy and nihilistic to do anything about it, it won’t be prioritized.

As long as it isn't mandatory like the Russian Max app, I wouldn't worry. The only reason to dislike it (other than privacy issues) is the money spent to develop it (which has already been spent).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_(app)

> only reason to dislike it (other than privacy issues) is the money spent to develop it (which has already been spent)

There are plenty of reasons to dislike it. The money spent to develp it. The attention spent to maintain it. The abuse of users' goodwill. Dilution of the FBI's brand with a circa 2008. None of these are good. None of them are, frankly, issues I'm going to personally engage on.

> You can mandate trees, but then you'll get less parking.

This implies we want to maximise car parking spaces in a city, when, I think, you'd want to maximise enjoyment of the city.

Your views are getting more unhinged by the day fyi.

You used to have interesting, if tediously contrarian things to say. But now it's just strawmans and weird takes like the above.

I wonder if his clients are aware of his posting history.

I know it's par for the course, but I'm constantly surprised to see how editorialised official communications from the US government are.

Everything is written in the voice of a terminally online Twitter troll. Every single communication from the U.S. federal government should be assumed to be a lie until proven otherwise.

I wonder how long it takes (it took?) before Americans think this is how it all should be, and that this is how it is in every country.

This "article" just rehashes the top submissions from the reddit thread and then adds some surface level musings about UX.

It also blasts you with a full screen subscribe popup, ostensibly in case you want to see more rehashed content.

Seriously, why not just link to the Reddit thread instead of this? It seems like every damn site has become a Torment Nexus.

In defense of this blogspam, the original posts were each individual submissions to /r/programmerhumor, so there's no easy way to link to a collection of them on reddit itself.

That wasn't part of the show? The popup (no idea what was on it, no one reads those of course) shows up and you think 'Ah. Yes, that would be very annoying if that happened while interacting with a volume slider.'

The popup also scrolled down for me and I had to scroll back up to hit the X.

Also, the post is on Medium.

It works fine with javascript blocked, thankfully.

That popup is typical of blogs hosted on Medium. I don't know if the author even has control over if it pops up or now.