Jotunn Draugr

Into The Dark: Mercenaries (Heroes of Fame and Fortune)

@Sleater@Jotunn Draugr@Jollan
By the ways guys, thanks for being patient. We are at the final battle now!

@POOHEAD189

Thanks for remembering us. Looking forward to hopping in when the time comes.

Valkyria Chronicles: Lions of the South

I guess so. Most people say they're having trouble posting for the battle, so I suppose we can just wrap it up.

This happened in the previous battle too, so I guess we should focus less on combat? Though it seems odd to have a military RP with out the... well, military.

@Raven_Operative

Well give us more to react to. We're just going in a direction, toward a thing. What can we do? Who are we up against. What are the paths and avenues available to us?

Valkyria Chronicles: Lions of the South

*flails* anyone alive in here?

@Raven_Operative

Yeah, kinda waiting for the story to move ahead, I think.

Malfunction -- The RP Where Having Superpowers Sucks (New Thread! Now with added friendship!)

I hope not. :(
What needs to happen to keep this going? Should we flesh out some plot points before continuing?

@SecretlyDiscord

llama makes a good point. Give us something to do.

Malfunction -- The RP Where Having Superpowers Sucks (New Thread! Now with added friendship!)

So is this dead now too?

Just Sayin'

The Unpopular Opinions Thread.

<Snipped quote by Jotunn Draugr>

I think I brought up before that the "They just need to be allowed to do their jobs" is a political line and describes more or less paying a few people to look for needles in haystacks. Case in point, Ann Coulter said it. She's as trustworthy a figure as quoting, like, Bill Maher or something. Political pundits are not sources.

<Snipped quote>

Low-skill workers are also Wal-Marts base. Limiting the amount of employees doesn't work because it limits the amount of patrons by the same number. This I think is where I really disagree with Trumps economic policies; It's smoke and mirrors, to hide the fact that the conditions the working class are faced with are naturally dictated by the nature of capitalism. This is pure economic snake oil. It's a good position because it's a problem that cannot be fixed (short of Latin America getting its shit together) and therefore can always be there to be blamed on the liberals.

As for agriculture, this is where illegal immigrant and just immigrant gets mixed together. The migrant agricultural workers, generally legal, have been part of the Western economic culture since, like, there was white people out there owning farms. It exists because the work is seasonal, low paying, not enough to sustain non-migrant populations, and because Americans generally don't like migratory work. Even if Trump manages to somehow get rid of all the illegal immigrants in the United States, Hispanic migrant workers would still be there. Which is good, because getting rid of them would be highly disruptive. You aren't going to be able to empty a bunch of Idaho bedroom communities to get your potatoes picked.

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That sounds so easy on paper, but it's a lazy dream of a plan. Okay, so you build the wall. The coyotes get clever, illegal immigration becomes a professional deal, and we have a big cement mess on our border for people to bitch about. You drag a few abuellas out of their sanctuary cities, make a few ugly headlines, and what you get out of it is a population stealing industrial jobs from Chihuahua because as it turns out you cannot get rid of them as economic units even if you throw them across the border. You shut down the guest worker program and western agriculture has a fit (probably won't be shut down because of this. Agriculture is a hell of a lobbyist). And what you get is... well, like I said, you've just moved economic units around. If we take a protectionist stance against Mexico and China, our access to cheap products dwindles equal to our cheap labor so that the purchasing power of the average American either stays the same or dwindles.

Protectionism doesn't work. This is, like, economics 101 from every modern economic theory still in practice. It's populist but it's impractical because it always requires making decisions on half of the information. A competing worker lost is a customer lost, a foreign competitor quelled is a foreign market closed. It sounds good because it allows people to imagine that there is just this one tiny thing in their way, but it's not the way the real world works.

I guarantee you, grab some modern economic books, the heady academic shit and not the silly pundit to-be-sold-in-grocery-stores stuff, and you'll find immigrants on the backburner to real, and much more complicated, problems.

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Calm down. Take a deep breath.

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Always? I've done this plenty of times and never saw food come up as a serious argument. It seemed a bit tone deaf that you took it so seriously.

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I guarantee you I don't base my ideas on what the Mexican government thinks. They're to blame for a lot of this. That they'd chase a childish policy like building a border wall is par for the course as far as their poor method of government is concerned.

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The drug problem is incidentally where I come to agree with you here. Whereas the economic argument might be diversionary at best, the drug problem is something we should really be focusing on. A big part of Mexico's problem, and really our problem as well, is the cartel empire in the north pushing drugs over the border. There is nothing good coming out of that. Now, I don't think a wall will fix that issue, but moving resources currently committed to chasing abuellas, or cracking down on drug-users or the production of soft drugs, to deal with the hard drug problem, that seems like it would be good policy.

But the rest of it is weak. The world economy as it stands now is global. A Mexican stealing an American job in Tulsa, if sent back over the border, will steal another job in manufacturing. If we went back to the high tariff system, Mexico (or China or whoever) would reciprocate and our access to cheap goods would diminish. You can't really find the 'Golden Capitalism' or whatever, what you see is what you get.

Illegal immigration is as it stands a cheap populist issue the right likes to use because they know it can't go away, and because they have maneuvered themselves into a place where they can always blame liberals on it. It's like a pinata with an endless supply of candy (or whatever a Trump regime would rename it. A Freedom Beating-doll?). Hell, I'm not even particularly offended at the idea he may try, because whereas I think he's chasing unicorns, It's not like anybody is suggesting anything growed up yet. Because really, the thing that annoys me about it is that we'd waste so much resources chasing such a stupid fix, taking away energy from any real fixes. But for that to be a problem there would have to be somebody trying to get a real fix in place, and we aren't really spending the energy to do so yet.

It's like we are biding our time until the whole system blows up or something. What do we do in the mean time, watch Trump pollute a few news cycles beating up field workers, or watch Hillary basically do nothing and tell us everything is fine? Neither does much of anything that'll have a good effect, so we are basically just choosing how we are going to fuck up.

@Vilageidiotx

Well a couple of points:
-People with decent paying jobs shop and Walmart too. It's not a 1:1 ratio.
-What's wrong with stopping cheap goods from being imported from China? I shouldn't have to remind you that there was a time when such products were all made in America, and the economy was doing just fine.
-Well if there are any academic-level economic books on the subject, that you've personally read, you're welcome to cite them, and I'll give them a look.
-I'm sure you're likewise aware that protectionism comes with tariffs on imported goods, meaning a Mexican thrown out of Tulsa, won't "steal another job in manufacturing", as there won't be any American manufacturing south of the border.

I think you lost me a couple times. One was at the Chihuahua comment. If you don't mind, could you explain how exactly they're going to continue occupying American jobs when they're thrown out of the country? Likewise, what does "Latin America getting their shit together" have to do with this?

Which of these 'popular' lablels do you associate with?

<Snipped quote by Jotunn Draugr>

I'm not hearing anything, I'm reading.

If thinking stupid flat earth nonsense is stupid makes me an elitist, then I wear the elitist badge proudly, prick.

@Dynamo Frokane

Which of these 'popular' lablels do you associate with?

@Jotunn Draugr You havent adressed my points and comparisons(Stork and Flat Earth, Stupid Ideas of Liberals, Ability to run a country) so sadly the discussion ends here, plus you are calling creationism a religous tradition after admitting this has nothing to do with religion. Stick to the Trump stuff, this might not be your bag.

@Dynamo Frokane

Dude, you're hearing what you want to hear, and have missed the point on everything I said. I might as well be talking to a brick wall. And to top if off, you're being an elitist prick about it.

"Sweet dreams, lilac."

The Unpopular Opinions Thread.

<Snipped quote by Jotunn Draugr>

It sounds like Nazi-accusation because we already do the other things for the most part. We don't have an open border policy, there is actually a pretty hefty system in place for flow-stemming (Cit: Born in East L.A. Dir. Cheech Marin). Which is why people suspect police-state ideas when this gets bandied about: because the plans are always suspiciously vague, or involve ideas that recall police-state imagery like walls and shit.

And I'd actually be pretty cool with mandatory English classes. I feel we might have tried that before though... but I can't be certain. Because here is the thing about mandatory: for something this huge, it suggests a probationary structure in place that can locate and track the immigrants and make sure they take their classes. But if we actually had a structure of that magnitude in place, we wouldn't have an immigration issue. It reminds me way back when I was doing work study in college in the computer lab of a subsidized housing project. They wanted to do mandatory computer classes, so they just sort of called them mandatory for anybody who wanted to use the computers and sent out the fliers. Nobody showed. So I suggested they give out free bus passes to anybody that shows up. And that worked, they had a decent handful come in. You can't just call something required. Gotta incentivize. Make sure English language classes are fucking easy to get into. Free classes in community colleges, maybe even government even foots the bill for bus rides to and from community colleges. That sort of thing. Hell, maybe pay people to take the classes. Whatever gets them in the door. It sounds expensive, but it'd be cheaper to do it that way then to create a hit-and-miss probationary system to handle it.

@Vilageidiotx

Yah, you could go with the carrot method, and bribe them into doing it. Or you could use the stick, and say "you must attend and pass these classes, or you will not be granted citizenship/residence/landed-status/etc, and you will have to continue hoping your visa can be renewed on time". Of course, this would necessitate enforcement. The United States already has laws and punishments for visa overstays, but they're not regularly enforced. To quote Ann Coulter, "We already have an immigration task-force, JUST LET I.C.E. DO THEIR JOB".

<Snipped quote>

I honestly don't think the cheap labor lobby is really the reason it isn't being handled. That sounds a whole lot like a political line of its own (remember, Trump is a political snake-oil salesman too, don't drink the election-time kool-aide). Because the cheap labor being exploited is primarily being exploited by local contractors and shit like that. They aren't they heavy hitters economically speaking, because immigrants mostly get stuck with unskilled labor, which is already easy to exploit as it is. You don't need illegal immigrants to keep Wal-Mart wages poor. When I think of all the busts I have ever heard about personally, it has always been shit like tree farms and construction sites.

Hold the phone. Why don't you need illegal immigrants to keep Walmart wages poor? Surely, if you vastly reduce the supply of low-skill workers, and the demand is still there (Walmart being America's biggest sole employer), they'll have to do something to entice people to come work for them. When there's a limited supply of workers, and an excess of employers, the employers have to start offering more to beat out their competition, or risk being understaffed and going out of business.
How did agriculture, and other low-skill labour ever function, before you were able to bring in cheap Mexicans to do it? Oh yah! It used to be that teenagers and young adults would do it, which is coincidentally the most under-employed group in the country now, more so than ever in American history (possibly excluding the great depression).

If you want to handle the exploitative part, you gotta ask who you go after: the exploited, or the exploiters? There are a whole lot of ways to do this. Now, if I were made dictator of the United States and got to just decide, I'd give free citizenship to any illegal immigrant who could show his boss was breaking labor laws (beside just hiring an illegal I guess), and then the person or persons found guilty of the exploitation would get life in prison and all their property confiscated automatically. That's impractical for several legal reasons too, albeit it is far more practical than the alternatives. Still, more symbolic of where my political tendencies lay.

So yes, it's difficult to fix, and anybody telling you otherwise is selling something.

If you want to handle the exploitation, first start enforcing the law. There are entire cities, occupied exclusively by tens of thousands of illegal immigrants each (if not more). These cities are known to the police, but nothing is done. When a local company needs new workers, they can just swing by one of these "sanctuary cities", and pick up two dozen willing workers. Step one is build the wall, to shut off the flow of immigrants. Step two is send the illegals back over the wall, creating a vacuum of low-skill employees. Step three is shutting down the guest-worker program, increasing the vacuum. Step four is simply waiting for the illegal immigrants that are already employed to integrate into society. Before you know it, there aren't any more easily exploitable non-English-speaking foreign workers, and their wages will start rising already, as more and more employers find themselves short on cheap labour, and are forced to pay more to bring them over.

<Snipped quote>

Is that like her line or something? "Hillary Clinton supports good tamales?" Because if liking burritos makes me a Blue Dog, then god help me i'm a Blue Dog. And if Hillary Clinton wants to pay me to like burritos, then fuck it, I'll sell out. One thing I like better than burritos is paychecks. (seriously hillary, pm me pls. sorry i voted for bernie.)

When we're talking about rising poverty levels, record unemployment, income inequality, human exploitation with conditions akin to slavery, I couldn't give a shit about your ability to get a tasty novelty food category, and no one else who takes this situation seriously should either. If the livelihood of your fellow man, and the suffering of your neighbour to the south, is worth less than a good burrito... Well I just hope you're in the minority.

I mention Hillary Clinton, because the pro-immigration/amnesty side of this discussion always brings up food as the example of "cultural enrichment", as though this doesn't pale in comparison to real issues. It's such a privileged position to speak from, where your life and livelihood is secure enough that your only concern is getting more food variety.

<Snipped quote>

We going to start taking advice from Mexico on how to govern a country? Also, how much wall are they going to build when they don't even have a handle on half their border with Guatemala? I'd think being able to govern more than half of your country would take priority to building a wall in the middle of the rainforest. Shit, theirs sounds like a much worse idea than ours. Trump's is just a waste of money to make us look bad, the Mexican one is completely nonsensical.

Yes yes, I'm not saying they're going to do a good job. I'm just noting that the concept of a border wall is far from unprecedented (Israel is another great example), and that it's a bit ironic that Mexicans are complaining about a wall, when they themselves are building a wall.

<Snipped quote>

Well no, but I've also not had those experiences in the Mexican parts of any of the places I live either (gotta go down there to get the real chorizo). I have no doubt that East LA is a fucking nightmare, but not every Hispanic neighborhood looks like that automatically. If I want to get accosted about hard drugs, I don't even have to go downtown, there is a good white trash meth-head neighborhood just a mile from here. The sort you don't pull into driveways because some nervous fuck might hop out of his trailer with a shot gun to protect his lab.

Which is not to disparage my own people, but rather to point out that my experiences do not mesh with this particular "The Immigrants did it" line of easy-fixism. Shit's not that simple. I believe Trump can fix the immigration problem just as much as I believe Hillary Clinton can fix poverty.

Yes, crime springs up from poverty, even in our own culture, but America isn't doing itself any favours by importing millions of dirt-poor people, with no education or prospects, who's culture (language included, of course) conflicts with the local culture.

I'd like to note that the influx of Mexican labour driving the wages down, and sucking welfare money out of the system, sure isn't doing the poor any favours, and may even be contributing to the conditions that result in white ghettos. Also, where are these locals getting their hard drugs from in the first place? Ten bucks says it's from Mexico.

Of course, everything is a matter of scales and degrees, but the more socio-economical-cultural division we have, the more likely we are to get these unlivable, inhospitable sections of our own country.