Our household income is 300k, and I took a big risk purchasing a home in Socal where mortgage is 50% of our take home income. In a space of 1 year or so, we went from saving two out of four paychecks each month, to sinking two into mortgage each month.
For me, we have one kid and we plan to stay put for at least 10 years. It's a good school district. The quality of life is excellent considering the weather, outdoors, cultural diversity, things to do, and proximity to international airport. We have friends and family here.
But to me what mattered most is that I am 40, our income is going to plateau. Renting is good advice, but in 5-10 years, we won't be able to afford rent here, let alone buy. On the other hand, I can refinance now and bring my mortgage down to what I was paying for rent previously, and in 10-15 years be mortgage free at a place with all the benefits I mentioned above.
> Renting is good advice, but in 5-10 years, we won't be able to afford rent here, let alone buy.
You don't know if you will get priced out. You don't know how housing prices will evolve in your area. They could as well go flat or fall. That uncertainty about local affordability can suffice as an argument for buying. Just don't confuse it with certainty about your future ability to afford the local area.
Maintaining your own home is a great hobby for guys 40 years old and older. The house may age, but your engagement and knowledge of your house steadily grows. Even contracting out the work has its interesting elements. Keeps you active as you age, both mentally and physically.
The key for older homeowners is finding your querencia, the place of your heart. If where you live is your querencia, then countless options open up for you. Simply living in your home and community becomes a joy. Your community becomes an extension of your home and your heart and you become a vital part of that community. In your golden years, that community provides deep meaning and grounding when your work life quickly fades. Building that connection takes time and energy…plopping yourself somewhere else in your 60s, you may not find it. Building it now and in your 50s guarantees it’s there when you want it.
I received my green card in 2023 and I have mixed emotions.
On one hand, I'm so relieved that I have been able to dodge everything that the administration has been throwing at immigrant (legal and illegal alike), trying to see what sticks, like mass deportations, border wall expansion, visa restrictions, asylum crackdown, H-1B cuts, and chain Migration Ban.
On the other hand, we cannot apply for citizenship for 3 more years, even though me and my wife have been in the US for combined 25+ years, and paid over $100,000 in taxes last year alone, and it's jarring to imagine what the administration will come up with next to make the process less straightforward than it seems.
Most disturbing is the fact that a lot of people I know who climbed the same ladder will go out and cheer what the administration is doing.
I received mine in 2020 and have decided to move back home. The uncertainty in general just keeps me up at night. Feels like the goalposts could move at any moment. I know I'm likely overreacting but it is what it is.
You have ICE officers randomly abducting people off appearance alone and then detaining them for days if not weeks. If you were a citizen the whole time, cool who cares.
No one in America has any rights.
That aside, even as someone who's been in this country for generations, I've been exploring options to leave.
America is behind most of the developed world in terms of standards of living. I was in Asia for a while and I felt a fraction of the fear I constantly do at home.
GC holder of 25 years with citizen parents. I agree with you and I stress about this daily. It's always been a shitty deal though - we are taxed with no representation in government.
>we are taxed with no representation in government.
In which country can you emigrate to and be allowed votes in government representation just because you pay taxes? I'm an EU citizen and living in another EU country and am not allowed to vote in that country's government elections, just local ones. If you want to vote at government level then you need to apply and get citizenship which also comes with the responsibility(or obligation more accurately) of military draft.
Everything about this seems pretty fair to me. I'm not sure why not to you. If you're not a citizen you shouldn't be allowed to vote at gov level since you're not subject to a draft, because in case the shit hits the fan militarily, unlike citizens, you can just pack your bags and go back to your home country and avoid dying in the front lines. So why would any country let people who aren't subject to draft vote? Makes no sense. You don't have the same skin in the game as citizens who are draftable just because you pay some taxes.
Now if you're paying taxes in a foreign country where you can't vote, it means you're there voluntarily because you're getting a much better deal than being in your own country where you can vote. Probably you're in the US because you make orders of magnitude more money than in your own country, but nobody in the US dragged you there against your will to work and pay them taxes, you agreed to this situation voluntarily because it also benefits you personally, and you would just as easily leave if it stopped benefiting you.
> In which country can you emigrate to and be allowed votes in government representation just because you pay taxes?
There are a few, with varying degrees of residency time (and possibly other conditions) required. New Zealand requires being a resident for a year.
The UK is particularly interesting, if you're a citizen of a common wealth nation you can vote in national UK elections if you're a resident.
Personally, I agree with you though. I didn't vote in the UK despite being able too. Let the citizens decide the future of their nation, I have the privilege to leave (and have done so already). Feels wrong for me to influence the nation when I'm not fully invested in the outcome.
As a person, why should you not have a say in how things are governed where you live?
The idea that you should be required to swear some loyalty to a government before you get a say in how the place you live is governed is the position that’s actually absurd.
(Yes, I do think there should be a global republic and that there should be full freedom of movement. It’s way past time for that.)
Because as a non-citizen, you are technically still a guest?
If you love the place you're living in and want to actively participate in its governance, including implementing any changes, you should obtain citizenship.
And even if you do, your stake would still be less than those who've been living there all their lives, across many generations. Maybe the natives actually don't want the changes that the immigrants want to see implemented.
(not going to argue the finer details of ethics like racism or xenophobia, etc. which I acknowledge can often come up in cases like this).
We did not meet continuous residency requirements for 10-15 years due to travel for my dad's work. Afterwards, it took me nearly 5 years to meet that requirement due to the fact that I lived and graduated abroad for highschool. I tried around COVID, was denied based on truthfully admitting I had smoked some weed in the previous 5 years while I lived in Colorado. That reset my clock for another five years. I constantly wrestle with whether I even want to be associated with this country for the rest of my life. I'm prideful and a high earner, there's only so much I'll accept before moving my family and assets somewhere else.
Hope that provides some color. To all the fans of the current immigration policies - you are throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
> we are taxed with no representation in government
This is true in most highly-developed democratic nations. If it is so important to you, then you should become a citizen, or return to your home country (so that you may vote). And curiously, does your home country not have the same rule? Do you find that position hypocritical?
The choice is not so binary, as anyone seriously discussing this topic should immediately recognize. There are indeed ways for foreigners to participate in local politics in many countries, here is some data if you're interested in learning - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-citizen_suffrage
My country does in fact provide this right to foreign residents who live a certain amount of time in the country. Even if it didn't, it would not be a hypocritical position to state something is bad. Do you think I wrote the laws? Hardly seems like a good-faith argument or even a sound one!
Or perhaps they mean the same thing as was meant by the slogan when it was first coined, around the time of the American Revolution, and the same thing as was meant by the women's suffragists who used it in the late 19th century.
Maybe in some sense "no taxation without suffrage" would be more accurate, but it would be a worse slogan. In any case, "no taxation without representation" is a well known phrase, it's been around for over 250 years, and I don't think much is achieved by nitpicking its wording.
You do have congressional representatives and senators who represent you and your interests and can take action on your behalf just as they would if you were a citizen. I have had decent luck in getting assistance from them despite not being a citizen.
Yes and colonial Americans had personages they didn't choose representing their interests at court so clearly that was not what they meant by it, let alone as members of the British empire their interests were represented by the king the highest position in the land...
To exist is to be taxed. If you exist at all in the US, you will be taxed. You may even be taxed even if you are not in the US. So saying that taxation somehow implies voting ability would be quite absurd. This doesn't hold true anywhere in the world.
When someone says "No taxation without representation!" they don't mean "As a matter of fact, no one ever gets taxed by a government they don't have the power to vote for or against". (If that were true, there'd be no need to demand it.)
They mean "I would like our government to stop taxing people who don't get to vote for it" or "It is unjust for a government to tax people who don't get to vote for it" or something of that sort.
The fact that things aren't already the way you want them to be doesn't make it absurd to demand that they change to be that way.
(You might argument that governments don't give a damn what anyone demands and for that reason it is absurd to demand change. But I think that in fact governments do take notice of what people want, if they fear what the people might do if they don't get it. Whether that's voting them out of office or putting their heads on pikes or anything in between. And they will take more notice if more people are demanding whatever it is, and a large part of the point of saying things like "No taxation without representation!" is to get other people who aren't in the government to sympathize with your cause and maybe start demanding the same thing. So I think it's manifestly not absurd to make such demands, as such. Some particular demands -- "No taxation without $1M/year universal basic income!" -- would be absurd, but this one seems obviously not to be in that category.)
There is a typical ladder here though of non-immigrant/temp visitor, legal permanent resident, and citizen. The main practical distinction bw the last two is the ability to vote and hold office. What concretely is the demand here? That the last two should effectively merge into one? Or is it that everybody along this ladder should get to vote and that citizenship is a separate axis?
The demand is that there shouldn't be anywhere on that ladder where you are expected to pay taxes and aren't given the right to vote.
Is it a sensible demand? I dunno. Some people have thought so. Some other people have thought not. I'm not trying to settle that question; just trying to bring some clarity as to what the issue is.
America is also run by a cabal of pedophiles and despite that being pretty out in the open at this point, there have been no consequences for them at all. It's not a good looking situation when even CSA and genocide are met with an "eh, what can you do?" shrug by a populace that has been led to accept worse and worse every year.
Don't forget the blatant corruption at a scale we've never seen. Literal crypto scams are being run out of the Whitehouse, and no one seems to care. Complaining about Hunter Biden being on the board of some company seems so quaint at this point.
If this was actually true, there wouldn't be so many people from the developed world trying to immigrate to the US, and upset about the US government making this harder.
That just means the US is better than the place they’re moving from. It doesn’t mean the US is among the best places in the world. Also, public perception of how good things are through US media (Hollywood) is different from reality.
Many, many people immigrate for an imagination of what life in the US will be. Objectively speaking, the US really is far behind most of the developed world in standards of living .
Also, money. Salaries are simply higher in the US (even if life is worse and less fulfilling overall)
I'm an American currently living in the Philippines, and that's utter nonsense and I know it. Developing world countries are so far behind the US in infrastructure, clean water, food quality, pollution, overpopulation, waste disposal, cleanliness, littering, open public spaces, and numerous other vectors that your comment blithely ignores.
The only possible way you could write a comment like that with a straight face is that you've never walked through a barrio in a developing world country with brick block contruction and tin roofs with tires holding the roof on, or favelas in Brazil with crowding, unsanitary conditions and resulting disease, drug crime, and gang warfare.
The standard of living in the US is vastly better than in these third-world shitholes, and it requires a stunning amount of out-of-touch suicidal empathy to project that it doesn't.
The US is not "behind the developed world", it's literally the developed world. The lightbulb. The airplane. The telephone. NASA. Space X. Tesla. And on and on...
When people talk about being behind or ahead the developed world, they are talking about the average person's availability of food, housing, internet, AC, transportation, healthcare, education, culture, day to day life, etc. Not century+ old tech or the handful of Billionaires' pet projects. Or, well, really, most of the time people just mean "The US is not like a subset of European (Likely Nordic) countries".
But that's besides the point, because I'm not the person making the argument. I was just pointing out that the comment was misread and misresponded to.
Not every (slightly) authoritarian government is akin to a regime that was responsible for the industrial scale killing of more than 11 million people.
Perhaps you should wait to make that case, we're starting to see ramifications from USAID cuts as the worse one, but there's also health and nutrition effects from Medicaid/SNAP reductions, and whatever in the world is happening on immigration and detention with insane ICE behaviour, plus second order effects from abortion and public health changes.
Genuinely curious, what does taxes have to do with it? Everyone pays taxes, legal or illegal in some form.
I don’t think paying your dues should make you more likely to get through the pipeline. After all, you paid those taxes because you made good money, which is what people come here for.
> A plurality of Americans don’t pay federal income taxes
What does a plurality even mean here? This is a binary question, so plurality and majority are the same thing. And I don't think it is factually correct that the majority of Americans do not pay income taxes.
I didn't look hard but that's the first thing I found. Famously, Mitt Romney complained that 47% of Americans don't contribute to federal income tax revenue, which is what I was thinking of.
Side note...I hate this stat because it makes it sound like the rich are paying their share of taxes. The reality is that people who make large w2 income pay a large part of federal taxes, and while they would be considered rich they are not the ultra-rich we see in the news every day.
> .I hate this stat because it makes it sound like the rich are paying their share of taxes
Yes! I agree, I don't mean to sound like I support the status quo. In this particular case, I wanted to clarify that green card-holding immigrants carry a disproportionate amount of tax burden (but that is not to support the current state of things).
I didn't mean to imply you did support the status quo. And you're right about GC holders as they tend to make good money and fall into the worst spot tax wise - having a large w2 income.
Yes, technically payroll taxes are not income taxes.
And people who that x number of people do not pay income tax are implying they are paying no federal taxes when that is not true. It is a disingenuous argument.
But then they gave up a tax paying job and thus the net effect is zero.
Looking holistically the person leaving the US (or lets say 100 people to make it easier to see the point) means 1 to 30 less startups and so maybe an entire company or more not being started. That is less revenue for US.
What most people from the "they steal our jobs" mentality (not saying that is you, but this a seperate point) don't get is productive people create jobs by being a customer of many businesses.
>The facts show that just like the amount of labor is not fixed, neither is the size of the economy (fixed pie fallacy) and as more work is done, the economy grows
Your reply is a glib thought-terminating cliche strawman that doesn't address their point at all. Interesting!
Those theories are based mainly on the effect of Cuban immigration in Miami, however they lack a control so you can't really conclude anything.
Besides, yeah, if you hire people who will work for any salary, the amount of jobs will increase, but salaries will decrease, for locals as well. After some time, locals will flee sectors where the migrant workers are brought in, creating further self-inflicted "labor shortages"...requiring more migrants!
The main winners are capital owners, who, thanks to the migrant workers, can now acquire a larger part of the added value generated by workers.
But a jobs worth of GDP was lost due to the lost consumption. Harder to measure for 1 person but imagine 100k people suddenly left a city. That would be felt somewhere. Dry cleaners, cafe, supermarkets etc.
This might be less true if there is resource starvation but we have transport and imports and exports. You can accomodate more people and feed them.
There are not enough qualified people in any particular country for all the possible new technologies that could be deployed. You're not likely to hire your plumber to program a webapp.
That doesn't mean your plumber isn't qualified—just that people looking for webapps want to hire workers who know how to make them.
So many computer science grads can't find work many have left the field. I don't think we will run out of workers.
There is the other side plenty of workers successful at programming language could be trained to fill any gap. That's what happened in the 50s and 60s..
Companies struggle to hire at a rate they want to pay. They don't struggle to hire at a market rate pay or more. Funny how that works.
PS The number of roles that there aren't qualified Americans for could be counted on one hand. This has always been about reducing salaries, not shortages.
I highly doubt a company can find 20k senior Photolithography experts in rural Nebraska if a company wanted. No matter what money they are paying. They'll have to bring them in.
Of course I am exaggerating, but this is not a 1 dimensional problem.
The issue is that if you import all of skilled workers you need, salaries won't rise in the branch, and students or workers in adjacent fields don't have any incentives to learn the skill. If you can hire Syldavian photonics engineers for 50k$/y, no one is incentivized to learn photonics.
This is why in the modern world some sectors are always crying about "worker shortages" while asking always more migrant workers to come in - salaries are compressed as a result, and locals have no incentives to enter the branch.
Hence importing workers may be useful for needs that are limited in time and space (say, install a specialized foreign machinery in a power plant), but systematic importation leads to dequalification of the local workers, who flee the branch that has now low salaries.
it's a companies not wanting to spend any amount of time and money training an employee and wanting 100% utilization the second the employment starts issue.
Those seem like bold assumptions about % of startups created by green card holders?
I feel like the better argument is that the greencard holder was the best candidate and thus will be more productive in the role. It is just efficient resource allocation. That, even without new companies, will drive profit/expansion/more jobs
At a certain point, there aren't enough Americans for these jobs. So the choice is to let other nations absorb these skilled laborers, or simply hire the best people.
It's funny how we forget about meritocracy as soon as the median American is threatened.
> At a certain point, there aren't enough Americans for these jobs
Is that really true? I’m sure in some fields where you need rare experts I believe it. For the average engineer who is just another cog in the wheel of big corp, I highly doubt it.
> Is that really true? I’m sure in some fields where you need rare experts I believe it. For the average engineer who is just another cog in the wheel of big corp, I highly doubt it.
Have you ever hired someone before? Did you decide to take the best person you found or did you pick an American?
> Have you ever hired someone before? Did you decide to take the best person you found or did you pick an American?
Many times. Sometimes we don’t offer sponsorships so we hired who didn’t need one. Other times not. During the interview process where they’re from isn’t the matter at hand. Either way, there’s no shortage of good candidates - solely American / GC or not.
Though let’s be honest - there is a question behind the question, isn’t there? Why don’t you just ask that instead?
That doesn’t directly prove that there aren’t enough Americans who can do the job. Sometimes yeah, the non American is better like in photolithography.
Generally though, the foreign candidate is not so much better that hiring an American would have lowered the bar.
Sometimes it also comes down to leveling - I’ve had to down level people due to budget concerns. Americans can hold out for that better job, but the other cannot so companies take advantage of that.
My point is that it’s not a skill issue, it’s a wage + location issue. Foreigners will find that their wage is better than what they can earn at home, so they can undercut that citizens who’s held out for a better opportunity.
> so they can undercut that citizens who’s held out for a better opportunity.
Just to better understand, genuinely, do you mean that the company would increase their budget in the event that a foreign worker had not been available, and that an American would have taken the job at that time, given the higher wage?
Why wouldn’t they? It’s a supply and demand thing, supply is lower so pay is higher to meet demand.
Other ways to solve is to settle for less if the job isn’t that crucial, or look for someone who lives in a lower cost of living area who can take the wage. But that also depends on the whole RTO fiasco.
To be clear, if you are doing leading edge R&D or some super special project like SpaceX, etc then yeah you need to seek the brightest minds across the globe. But to maintain your CMS or work in some ERP softwares, you can definitely find an American to do it.
The basic point I’m making is a large majority of H1B work can be done just as well (within an acceptable error rate) by someone here. There are reasons why you need some special talent but those aren’t as common.
With AI taking a percentage of jobs there will be enough people to fill those positions and more. Why bring in workers when productivity is taking away positions.
> With AI taking a percentage of jobs there will be enough people to fill those positions and more. Why bring in workers when productivity is taking away positions.
>It's funny how we forget about meritocracy as soon as the median American is threatened.
What meritocracy? This is a myth pushed to justify a kind of "just world" interpretation of our social ills. Nepotism is increasing, social mobility decreasing. To believe in meritocracy in the face of this is to deny reality.
I can already on the ground see the effect of the Trump policies. So many tech jobs that would have been in the US are being lost. And companies are learning how to be effective with overseas teams.
"Immigrants doing a very large portion of tech work can't be just because they get paid less"
It is solely about that. Remember, immigrants didn't really play a role in the US tech industry for half of its existence and didn't play a major role until a decade ago. This is despite the fact that US colleges openly and actively discriminate against US citizens for grad school spots for 2 or 3 decades now.
> This is despite the fact that US colleges openly and actively discriminate against US citizens for grad school spots for 2 or 3 decades now.
Can you provide a citation for this specific claim? I used to do admissions to a grad program in the US, and we ended up admitting mostly foreign students soley because very few US citizens actually applied (probably only 10% of apps). Whether that's because they were not qualified or couldn't afford it I do not know. But it's not because they were openly and actively discriminated against.
Not just that, universities (especially smaller research universities) love having grad students whose research is paid for. China, Saudi Arabia, Brazil (less so now than in the past), Qatar, and others have all had programs for years where they paid the tuition and research costs of students at universities. Why would the university not pick that over a local kid who the university has to pay for out of their own coffers?
> Not just that, universities (especially smaller research universities) love having grad students whose research is paid for.
> Why would the university not pick that over a local kid who the university has to pay for out of their own coffers?
Universities don't pay for research - and departments usually don't pay for research either.
At the margin, a professor will prefer someone who has her own funding, but that person also needs to be competent, so I doubt the national schemes you are citing have made an impact on who gets into graduate school.
I've been involved in .. applied CS for 40 years, and the industry has been filled with people of a wide variety of backgrounds for that entire time. Even during the time I worked for the US DOD many of the people I worked were international.
> So we’re essentially turning away someone who is building up our country.
They're not being turned away. There's a requirement to be in the country for 5 years with a green card before citizenship. It seems to me that they are just upset that they have to follow the rules which aren't hurting them at all.
They are actually in fact being told to return to their country before completing a process that previously - legally! - could be done in the US. That = being turned away
> There's a requirement to be in the country for 5 years with a green card before citizenship.
That is absolutely irrelevant to the discussion at hand.
Until next week, or whenever the current system is again upended haphazardly.
> It seems to me that they are just upset that they have to follow the rules which aren't hurting them at all.
It seems to me that they were all following the rules. The rules are now being capriciously changed with sly marketing words to confuse everyone.
They are effectively being ruled by a system that they have no say in. That's incompatible with America's democratic values. Of course it's reasonable that we don't allow non-citizens the vote; the problem as I see it is that if someone has worked here for 25 years for all intents and purposes they are a citizen, the government just doesn't formally recognize the reality of their situation.
This is so confusing. What does GC -> citizenship have to do with this? The rules work fine now because they apply for the change of status and keep on working until its accepted and leave if not. This new rule means they have to leave the country they are living and working in for anywhere from 1 month to 2 years, probably losing their job and majorly disrupting their lives for seemingly no reason at all. People who have lived in the US for a decade with a job, mortgage, family and children randomly need to leave to years, and what does that accomplish for anyone? If the govt. wanted to deport them, they could do it at any moment. The govt. can process their change of status paperwork exactly the same whether they're in or out of the country. So what is the point of any of this?
Taxes are supposed to pay for public services. An efficient visa system is a public service. If you pay tons of taxes but don’t get a public service that’s personally very important to you, it’s natural to feel let down
You have to do a lot when you get a green card to prove you won't be a burden on the US tax payer. It's a big part of the system and a big part of the anti-immigrant rhetoric
> Genuinely curious, what does taxes have to do with it?
It's popular trope from the GOP that immigrants are an economic drain on the US. They get free <insert whatever you want>, so the US must throw them out to save money.
Just because someone pays some taxes (it's hard to avoid paying sales tax if you buy a thing in a store, regardless of your citizenship), doesn't mean they're a net economic benefit to the country they live in, depending on exactly what taxes they pay and what taxpayer-funded services they get.
Immigrants come to the US with a variety of financial situations. Some immigrants are blatantly scamming welfare systems designed for poor Americans or are outright committing fraud (this is much of what is going on with the federal investigation and charges of Somalis in Minnesota). Other immigrants are paying taxes comparable to what American citizens would pay (this is probably the case for most people on H1B visas in the tech industry).
> Taxation without Representation was literally the driving force for the creation of America itself
The issue of taxation without representation had far more to do with the founders’ status as Englishmen and British subjects than their status as taxpayers. Paying taxes by itself was not a sufficient qualification for political representation. Felons, minors, and women were also required to pay taxes in the 1770s, despite not being able to vote. Immigrants who believe that the taxes they pay entitle them to this representation have bought into a falsified version of American history that was popularized during the Civil Rights Era.
United States Congress, “An act to establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization,” March 26, 1790:
> Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, That any Alien being a free white person, who shall have resided within the limits and under the jurisdiction of the United States for the term of two years, may be admitted to become a citizen thereof on application to any common law Court of record in any one of the States wherein he shall have resided for the term of one year at least, and making proof to the satisfaction of such Court that he is a person of good character, and taking the oath or affirmation prescribed by law to support the Constitution of the United States, which Oath or Affirmation such Court shall administer, and the Clerk of such Court shall record such Application, and the proceedings thereon; and thereupon such person shall be considered as a Citizen of the United States.
> I don’t think paying your dues should make you more likely to get through the pipeline. After all, you paid those taxes because you made good money, which is what people come here for.
To show that they're not freeloaders. A lot of right-wingers have a belief that immigrants are implicitly freeloaders, and therefore getting rid of them will make the economy better.
Of course it's just not true. Like most current Republican talking points, it's plainly fabricated; it's an outright lie. But, since a lot of people believe it, it's useful to reminder everyone that its not the case.
A very common xenophobic narrative is that foreigners do two things at the same time (1) steal your jobs and (2) drain your social systems. Another even more vile one one would be anything to do with coming for your daughters and women, but for this you will have to favtor in race. Because a rich white Frenchman coming your daughter doesn't have the same ring to it for bigots.
If the US, a country with a too low birthrate, throws out even the best kind of migrant (namely the kind that generates a lot of value for the country), you're going to be in deeper shit than ever before for decades to come.
Now I agree that paying taxes or not should have nothing to do with it.
It's not just a narrative and has been proven true, at least for (2).[0]
For (1), I think that a good discussion with any business owner in a migrant-dominated field will tell you that hiring foreigners is done to keep costs low and avoid Baumol's law. As a result, locals don't want to work in such fields, reinforcing the need for migrants.
So what you're saying is that people arriving in a country don't earn as much as people with established ties there? Cool. I wonder how that could be? /s
> people arriving in a country don't earn as much as people with established ties there
Not true as Europeans are not concerned.
> how that could be
It doesn't have to be like this; for instance, you could require that migrant workers earn at least 2x the median salary to get a visa. It would avoid the whole exploitation of third-world workers paid a subsistence salary to save on costs.
"Most disturbing is the fact that a lot of people I know who climbed the same ladder will go out and cheer what the administration is doing."
I always joke that all naturalized (citizens) immigrants automatically become republican. I say it in earnest because effectively all naturalized people who I know side with anti-immigration, except agaisnt people they know, but none of them take my "joke" seriously.
I got mine in 2019 and feel the same way. I'm actually in the process of applying for citizenship and my application seems to have stalled - it's been nearly 10 months when the USCIS processing times page says I should expect 7 (it was 5-6 when I applied). There's been some articles that the government is going to force everyone to retake fingerprints again although there's been nothing official about that yet. I really wish I had applied for citizenship as soon as I was eligible.
I was approved 2 weeks ago. The process took 4 years end to end. I've been updating my paperwork (SSN, Global Entry and CA DL). I saw this news and immediately thought that it would've impacted me and I wouldn't've been able to maintain my job until a consular interview.
Also a consular interview has no appeal process. A denial stands unlike AOS.
I am paying taxes in US for over 20 years, don't hold a green card, not interested in ever getting one and not complaining that I don't have the right to vote. How are these things related?
> me and my wife have been in the US for combined 25+ years, and paid over $100,000 in
Sounds like you may be a good candidate for Trump's gold card.
I'm being fecitious of course, but I'm just pointing out that thinking of citizenship worthiness in monetary terms is something the president has already considered.
That was literally the premise of America at its foundation, and it’s a better national identity than this weird, ahistorical attempt at white christian nationhood currently popular on the American right.
That America was founded as an economic zone open to all seems more ahistoric. The phrase "ourselves and our Posterity" appears in the first sentence of the Constitution. And you cannot deny that the founders were in fact white Christians[0].
Look, I'm a visibly nonwhite immigrant. I am proud to be a naturalized American and have renounced all legal ties to the country of my birth. I think dual citizenship is at best weird, and I honestly don't understand how one squares that against the oath of allegiance. I believe the onus is upon the immigrant to assimilate, and that America is a rare place where that is in fact possible. I have no desire to recreate the country of my birth in America, especially not in a segregated ethnic enclave.
I would like to live in a colorblind America and, though it may sound implausible to you, I believe the American right has the better claim to that future than the left. I do not empathize more with potential immigrants from my ethnic background than I do with my fellow Americans, and I quite dislike it when those from the left automatically assume the former, because it means they are treating me as being fundamentally different than any other American. And I think this mindset is table stakes for any immigrant to any nation.
Much of the West has seen levels of immigration over the past few decades beyond the capacity of the native population to absorb in a way that results in assimilation. It has increasingly been from cultures that are substantially different, further hampering that effort. It's disconcerting to see that any efforts to pump the brakes even a little bit immediately results in accusations of racism or fascism.
[0]: I don't want to split hairs over 18th-century Deism. All of that was contained within the Christian cultural framework, anyway.
Hey man, I get it, you’re new here. I don’t know how anyone observing the American right could possibly believe what you believe, and especially not if you’ve been observing them your entire life like I have, but if I was a new citizen of a country, I imagine that I’d also have some pretty naive beliefs too. Best of luck to you.
It's a pressure campaign to get the Iranian leadership in one place so that Israel can bomb them again. There was a deal, the president cancelled it in his previous term.
I also have a $900 monitor (provided from work) which is also a built in kvm switch, and it can show two desktops, one HDMI/windows and one usb-c/mac, side by side or as an inset as well. There's no delay switching either.
It is supposed to hot-switch the inputs if I move the mouse to the edge, but it does not, I guess it's because one of them is HDMI.
I used to have a Lenovo dock that I used as a switch, but not anymore and there's definitely less clutter.
Interesting responses here. I think most are missing the point.
For me, the main lesson here is seeing and learning from how others are using skills. Yesterday I was watching a Matt Pocock class on using agents and he was also showing off skills, such as how he uses a "grill-me" skill to develop product requirement document. I am certainly not going to do exactly what he does, but I now have my own ideas about how to develop requirements and implement them.
After all, in the word of Anthropic engineers themselves, Claude is like a talented engineer, but lacks expertise. Skills are folders and files that build expertise. Another important thing I leaned from Pocock is that the longer the context (or token size), the dumber the responses tend to get. So skills are another way to present the problem to an LLM in a compact manner and get optimized response.
Claude also has behavioral traits. So if someone iteratively builds a skill, it is most likely not going to port well to another user, because each of us chat differently. This is why I hesitate to share my skill folder with my colleagues. But I will certainly demo what I built so that they can see what's possible and figure out their own workflows.
So the value is in seeing how someone else builds using Claude, and imitate in your own way. Very much like when I first learned programming, I was copying code form Kernighan and Richie's C book, but then changing up things to understand how it works and later customize the code for my purpose.
I mentioned behavioral traits for another reason- the author is a psychologist and it is really interesting to see how she interacts with Claude, which is probably very different from how programmers use Claude. Tangentially, she (and a host of other experts in the field) left Twitter long time ago. I'm going to install bsky/mastodon and follow them, because I think it's important to watch how expert non-programmers are using LLMs.
My manager reported couple of days ago that copilot manipulated some tests in order to make edge cases pass.
We have standalone prototypes for our product, so it was easy to catch, but actually going in to debug and fix was much harder than expected.
It absolutely did nothing to increase confidence on copilot though. I personally manually accept each line of code copilot writes, unless it's a skill/mcp server we have no plan to deploy.
To be fair, such rhetoric in Iran was around long before this war.
It is also common knowledge [1] that more-pious followers of Islam - particularly in Middle Eastern countries - are considerably more receptive to Islam's more radical teachings and commands on the topic of the treatment towards non-believers (which makes up the bulk of Western nation populations), than Jewish or Christian followers are to their respective religion's teaching and commands in regards to the same.
Sharia Law. If you don't believe in Allah and the teachings within the Qur'an, feel free to look up how Sharia law dictates your treatment from its believers.
You are also mistaken, the Pew Research study explicitly lays out the percentages of individuals within Islam that believe in the death penalty for apostasy. For example, in Egypt, 86% of Muslims who favored making Sharia official law supported the death penalty for apostasy; in Jordan, it was 82%; in Afghanistan, 79%.
Hardly a reasonable take. Indeed, Sharia Law is a dog-whistle in Western nation talks, but that's a luxury on our part. It's a very real belief for a very real cohort of people, however distant they are from enacting action on us today.
I know what Shariah law is (incidentally, the word Shariah means "Law", that's like saying "law law" which is nonsensical). Now tell me what did you read about what it dictates form its believers?
Apostasy in classical Islamic scholarship is equivalent to treason - which many present day non-Muslim countries have the capital punishment for. Scholars have discussed this topic in detail, not every apostate has this applied to them.
>"incidentally, the word Shariah means "Law", that's like saying "law law" which is nonsensical"
I'm glad we could point out pedantic semantics - if you want to be outdone, "sharia" means "way". Nonetheless, "Sharia Law" is a term that means something in jargon and in colloquial, and it is understood to most (serious inquirers) as a mechanation of law, typically from a governing body, that is inspired and sourced by a mix of verses in the Qur'an, prophetic tradition, hadiths, and scholarly consensus between all aforementioned elements.
>"Now tell me what did you read about what it dictates form its believers?"
At least try to be genuine, please:
Surah 5:51: "O you who have believed, do not take the Jews and the Christians as allies. They are allies of one another. And whoever is an ally to them among you - then indeed, he is [one] of them."
Surah 9:5: "And when the sacred months have passed, then kill the polytheists wherever you find them and capture them and besiege them and sit in wait for them at every place of ambush. But if they should repent, establish prayer, and give zakah, let them [go] on their way."
The Jizya verse is all about sanctioning religious "freedom" and only even tolerating "People of the Book" outside Islam if they pay a special tax called a jizya.
And yes! To your point: "Apostasy in classical Islamic scholarship is equivalent to treason", it is with this belief that Islam is not predicated upon any belief of religious freedom - Western values are. Their beliefs are further predicated upon commands to treat People of The Book (Christians and Jews) with less-than-desirable behaviors, all of which I sourced above. We can talk about bans on places of worship and criminalizing proselytization outside of Islam if you're somehow not convinced?
But in any case, unless you want to play the excuse that Christians and Jews do from the other side of the aisle when they say that this was directed to a certain people at a certain time - which carries its own enormous pragmatic and theological flaws (and is often at great detriment to Muslims when logically exercised) - it is not possible to call the beliefs of a pious Muslim compatible with traditional Western Values. And this is just me appealing to the pragmatic, such conclusions follow logically what a pious Muslim's more-extreme beliefs are for religiously-tolerant cultures, and their beliefs towards the people that make them up.
Unconvincing. Wait till you see the percentage of modern Christians that disregard and ignore calls and commands for violence present in the bible, compared to believers within the other 2 Abrahamic religions.
Western values separated themselves from several beliefs demanded by the Christianity religions that inspired them. They self-governed and organically evolved beyond several parts of their source material (homosexuality and sodomy, slavery, religious violence, working on the sabbath, forced assimilation, torture and wartime measures, textile production).
> compared to believers within the other 2 Abrahamic religions.
Do you really want me to cite what israel has been doing for the past 75+ years and justified it from their own books? What did milekowsky literally say in one of his recent speeches?
> slavery
Still exists, but it changed forms.
> religious violence
Also still exists, but is a bit more concealed
forced assimilation,
See: europe
> torture and wartime measures
American and israeli war crimes are very well documented, and continue to this day
>"Do you really want me to cite what israel has been doing for the past 75+ years and justified it from their own books? What did milekowsky literally say in one of his recent speeches?"
You're clearly well-versed enough in this site's UX/UI to follow comments across a thread, presumably you saw my comment conceding Israel as a problem state now, as well:
>"American and israeli war crimes are very well documented, and continue to this day"
Yeah, so are those from Islamic States. But American war crimes didn't include sanctioning rape for prisoners of war for its history, and had a lot more regulation and moral reservations for pillage and conquest. A pretty good start - hopefully it evolves from here.
Most 'modern' Christians are barely even aware of the content of the Bible, and most adherents of all three religions are not acting on those commands anyway.
>They self-governed and organically evolved beyond several parts of their source material
Ah yes, wars, revolutions, general strikes, all famously acts of self-governance.
> if you want to be outdone, "sharia" means "way".
That's but one of its meanings. Arabic is a very rich language, and the word and its derivatives are used in the context of "canon".
As far as your citations, this has been responded to countless times [1]
Regarding Jizya, If you were being honest, you would know that (1) Muslims are reqired to pay more because of Zakat, (2) Jizya is only required from able males who can serve in the army, in exchange for them not serving. Women, children, elderly, and priests (regardless of age) are not required to pay the Jizya. You will find many occurrences in Islamic history where it was forgiven due to circumstances - read about cases involving the 2nd Caliph Umar Ibn Al-Khattab for example.
> with this belief that Islam is not predicated upon any belief of religious freedom
The Quran (which you cited when you thought it served your incorrect claims), Hadiths, and classical Islamic scholarship all refute this claim. Not to mention reality - Christian/Syriac people that exist in Muslims majority lands are but one example that prove that Islam enforces freedom of belief. Jews exist in Iran[2][3] who were bombed by israel, but you won't find it in the news.I bet you have not come across these Hadith before [4][5][6]
> all of which I sourced above.
No you did not.
> We can talk about bans on places of worship
Nope. Proof: churches and synagogues exist in Muslim lands, such as Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and (wait for it) Iran.
> it is not possible to call the beliefs of a pious Muslim compatible with traditional Western Values.
This is one thing we agree on. Classical liberal western values are at odds with Islam. The former has changed over time to fit the latest fad of the day; the latter is fixed at the core and root, while having branches flexible enough to encompass the needs of changing times and geographies.
>"That's but one of its meanings. Arabic is a very rich language, and the word and its derivatives are used in the context of "canon"."
So you can agree calling out someone for fair-read Arabic semantics is shallow, gratuitous and often grandstanding? Great! Look at us, stranger: Making progress.
>RE: Jiyza, Zakat
Zakat was almost never more than Jizya in practice. Zakat is also the act of charitable giving to the poor, Jizya is state-collection of funds - even during Rashidun Caliphate's times. It was a tax, with threats of state-sponsored violence when not complied with. Deals regarding Jizya were made as non-believing groups were conquered (if you believe this somehow helps your case) and didn't follow a uniform standard, but were typically on a MUST-PAY basis, unlike Zakat - which could be forgiven for impoverished persons and other circumstances.
>"[1]"
I haven't the time nor the inclination to debate clearly textualist passages in a religious text, when some religious scholar tries interpreting them "purposively" to make them more palatable to ANY audience, particularly modern ones. If you do, more power to you.
>"[2], [3]"
2's last sentence is fiercely at odds with 3's position - and these are single rabbi claims. I'm not sure what I'm looking at here?
>"No you did not."
Did you want your verses via Sunnah URL? Lol.
>"[4], [5]"
A Mu'ahid is a may-issue protection and there are plenty of believers and People of The Book that are not granted such protection, because it is an explicit and protected procedure - that requires ACTIVE action (covenant, treaty, or pledge). It is often a coerced agreement made with MUCH concessions required from the protected. And to add, its protection is not passively or implicitly granted, nor shall-issued. It is also not required of Islamic States to conscript, or to implement.
>"[6]"
Noble verse, not sure what it illuminates here though? That the Qur'an has the occasional good take?
>"Nope. Proof: churches and synagogues exist in Muslim lands, such as Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and (wait for it) Iran."
Cherry-picking. "What do you mean there are minority lynchings??? I see plenty of them alive and well, working in fields!"
>"This is one thing we agree on."
Well with any reading comprehension, you'll know my position that a pious Muslim's beliefs are incompatible with traditional Western values is the entire purpose of my position and my underlying justification for each and every comment I've left in this chain - that DIDN'T resort to personal attacks. So, I'm glad we agree?
>"The former has changed over time to fit the latest fad of the day; the latter is fixed at the core and root, while having branches flexible enough to encompass the needs of changing times and geographies."
You said the same thing twice, and just made the one describing the ideology you agree with sound more mature and refined.
> So you can agree calling out someone for fair-read Arabic semantics is shallow, gratuitous and often grandstanding?
It's not fair reading, but let's leave this for now.
> Zakat was almost never more than Jizya in practice
Incorrect.
> Zakat is also the act of charitable giving to the poor, Jizya is state-collection of funds
Incorrect. Zakat is required to be paid, it's not an optional act as you are trying to imply. The state has collected it, just like how Jizya was.
> with threats of state-sponsored violence when not complied with
"violence" like what? You mean just like how any current nation throws people in prison if they evade taxes?
> unlike Zakat - which could be forgiven for impoverished persons and other circumstances.
As I explained, Jizya is waived for women, children, priests, the elderly and the disabled. It was also waived if an able man volunteered to join the army in exchange.
> I haven't the time nor the inclination to debate clearly textualist passages in a religious text,
What do you call very clearly taking something out of context?
> I'm not sure what I'm looking at here?
You're looking at zionist crimes against Iranian jews.
> and there are plenty of believers and People of The Book that are not granted such protection , because it is an explicit and protected procedure - that requires ACTIVE action (covenant, treaty, or pledge).
You're speak as if you are certain of what you are saying, but I confidently say you are 100% incorrect. Remind us, what are your qualifications in this matter, or anything you claim to refute?
> Noble verse, not sure what it illuminates here though? That the Qur'an has the occasional good take?
It's not from the Quran. I think this is sufficient to prove my point - that you have no qualifications on this matter. I think we're done here.
"Incorrect [...] Zakat is required to be paid, it's not an optional act as you are trying to imply. The state has collected it, just like how Jizya was."
To pick my words more wisely: Yes, Zakat comes in the form a mandatory pillar of Islam under an Islamic state - often a tax, it is very rarely an "optional" charity. My point was more the framing between the two, and that Zakat is a financial obligation upon believers to share their wealth, while Jizya is a discriminatory tax on non-believers as a penalty for their refusal to accept Islam, paying for their "protection" from the state.
>"'violence' like what? You mean just like how any current nation throws people in prison if they evade taxes?"
Having a practice persist today isn't necessarily an argument that it's a good practice, or even a morally acceptable one (if you agree on this RE: tax, you'll find yourself agreeing with some prominient Western Enlightment thinkers, ironically). But, nonetheless, equating a religious tax to modern tax systems is a dishonest take. Modern tax regimes don't target you specifically for your refusal to convert to a state religion. The Jizya verse I mentioned earlier (though didn't cite: Surah 9:29) explicitly states non-Muslims must pay it "while they are disgraced, humiliated and belittled." It is not framed as a civil duty like most taxes; it is quite literally a religious-mandated humiliation ritual.
>"As I explained, Jizya is waived for women, children, priests, the elderly and the disabled. It was also waived if an able man volunteered to join the army in exchange."
The case remains, extorting the people of a minority group to fund an Islamic state - while politically and socially persecuting them - is morally reprenhensible.
>"What do you call very clearly taking something out of context?"
The oldest excuse in the book - and I already called this excuse out when I noted earlier that it's the exact same defense Christians use to wave away the violent commands in their own scriptures. If citing explicit, accepted verses and mainstream Sunni Tafsir is "taking things out of context", then the text is practically meaningless - and it doesn't sound like good faith in the material to me. The words are right there on the page.
>"You're looking at zionist crimes against Iranian jews."
I've already said Israel is a problem state. Doesn't change Islamic States can be, too.
>"You speak as if you are certain of what you are saying, but I confidently say you are 100% incorrect. Remind us, what are your qualifications in this matter[..]"
I don't need "qualifications" to engage in this conversation, besides understanding language. A Mu'ahid literally translates to "one who has a treaty/covenant". You cannot be a Mu'ahid without an active, explicit treaty with the Muslim state. Without that, traditional Islamic law classifies a non-believer as Harbi (at war).
>"It's not from the Quran."
Fair. I looked too quickly at your Sunnah.com links, wasn't familiar with their UI, and incorrectly referred to a Hadith as a Quranic verse. I apologize for calling it a Surah. It was a genuine slip on my part.
>"I think this is sufficient to prove my point - that you have no qualifications on this matter. I think we're done here."
Take the out if you need it. As I noted in my last comment, we already established that we agree on my foundational point: that pious Islamic beliefs are fundamentally incompatible with traditional Western values - and we should conduct ourselves accordingly..
It's not optional, not even rarely. It's important to understand the system that you're arguing against.
> as a penalty for their refusal to accept Islam,
That's your words. As I said, it's not imposed non non-fighters (women, children, elderly, and priests, among others). Fighter aged men got waived for serving in the army.
> Having a practice persist today isn't necessarily an argument that it's a good practice, or even a morally acceptable one
Who defines morals? We've seen the supposed morality of the west, on full display now especially after the epestein fiasco.
> too convert to a state religion
That's beside the point. There are many other "discriminatory" practices in present day secular nation states if you're going down that route. Some of these are fundamental to how states are run.
> to fund an Islamic state
You just assumed that (1) funding is the main goal, and (2) Jizya is able to support the system, even though I explained it was much less than today's income + sales taxes, which as we see, are not able to support the usurious financial system. More claims without evidence.
> it's the exact same defense Christians use to wave away the violent commands in their own scriptures
Apples to oranges. You literally snipped the text without reading the text that came before or after it. This is disengenuous. The small image I posted literally cites the text before and after it, and you explicitly admitted that you refused to read it.
> The words are right there on the page.
Exacltly, and you refused to read them.
> Doesn't change Islamic States can be, too
But not because they're Islamic.
> I don't need "qualifications" to engage in this conversation, besides understanding language
Totally incorrect (and you also showed you didn't understand the language). Please go educate yourself on how Islamic Scholars deduce rules (e.g. Fiqh, etc.). Language is one aspect of a whole curriculum. Ironically, it is this way of thinking that gave rise to certain fringe groups I'm sure you're quite aware of, and not just in Islam.
> that pious Islamic beliefs are fundamentally incompatible with traditional Western values - and we should conduct ourselves accordingly.
Yes, and we maintain that is a good thing, very clearly so given where the world is heading especially these days.
You're trying to stir religious hatred through lies, my friend.
Before diving into your link, I'll start by saying that anyone who spends time around Muslims will know they're people like everyone else and not the evil caricatures you're attempting to portray.
Your comment sounds like Muslims the world over want to kill infidels. The link says that Muslims in majority Muslim theocratic countries support Sharia being the law for Muslims. There is a lot less support in secular, majority-Muslim countries.
The survey doesn't cover Western countries, and in the countries closest to the West (Kosovo, Bosnia, Albania), support for Sharia among Muslims is 18%, and the majority of those 18% believe it should only apply to Muslims.
Some Muslims think apostasy deserves capital punishment: this is about Muslims abandoning their faith, not infidels.
Some other headings from your survey:
Extremism widely rejected
Few see tensions over religions differences
Widespread support for democracy, religious freedom
> than Jewish or Christian followers
Israel is an apartheid state, where ethno-religious supremacy of part of the population is law, where dehumanisation and killing of Palestinians enjoy widespread support 2.5 years into the genocide. A few weeks ago, a law was passed that allows hanging and applies, in practice, only to Palestinians.
Christian theocracies do not exist anymore, or for now, but it'd be fair to say they'll be equally as bad as any other theocracy.
>"You're trying to stir religious hatred through lies"
Every thing I've said here is driven by collected data. To note, I conceded in my below-cited comment that active religious hatred towards Middle-Eastern Muslims from Westerners is often a political dogwhistle, due to how distant they are from us in almost every sense:
>>"Indeed, Sharia Law is a dog-whistle in Western nation talks, but that's a luxury on our part. It's a very real belief for a very real cohort of people, however distant they are from enacting action on us today."
But we should know - and recognize - those who identify us as an enemy to their beliefs or advancements, even if they're presently inconsequential. I am not contributing to the active Islamophobia towards Western Muslims with anything I am saying, and let's use caution when prescribing such.
With that in mind, let's quote you more directly:
>"I'll start by saying that anyone who spends time around Muslims will know they're people like everyone else and not the evil caricatures you're attempting to portray."
Yes. Western Muslims are good people, and you'll see points in my comments on this thread directly support that, I was predominantly talking about the beliefs of Middle-Eastern Muslims, which overwhelming hold beliefs that are incompatible with my - and most Westerners - moral framework, even if you can get along with them at a corner market or when asking for directions. I even say this in my first comment:
>>"It is also common knowledge [1] that more-pious followers of Islam - *particularly in Middle Eastern countries* - are considerably more receptive to Islam's more radical teachings and commands on the topic of the treatment towards non-believers"
You also say:
>"The link says that Muslims in majority Muslim theocratic countries support Sharia being the law for Muslims. There is a lot less support in secular, majority-Muslim countries."
No, it supports it being the official law of the land and within the jurisdiction of the respectively-polled nation. It was not a poll to see what standards Muslims desire to hold themselves and fellow Muslims accountable. It is a poll about the percentage of Muslims in various Middle-Eastern countries support Sharia as their nation's official law. Your motivation for skewing the dataset's conclusion? I remain unsure.
>"Some Muslims think apostasy deserves capital punishment: this is about Muslims abandoning their faith, not infidels."
Most*
>"Israel is an apartheid state"
I'll concede Israel is now another one. The original scope of this discussion was a country - and its inhabitants - religious actions and consensus beliefs for the last decades, and Israel has only brazenly shown its hand for the same within the past 5 years, so they weren't on my mind when I wrote my comment. But good point bringing them up
The high ranking Shia mullahs/religious teachers that run the Islamic Republic ordered 3,000-30,000 of their own murdered in the streets for not wanting religious police to rape/murder them/their children/their sisters/moms if they didn't wear hats.
The highest of the Shia religious leaders don't need much 'justification' they happily order their religious police/religious proxies to carry out acts of mass violence.
I'm pretty sure shaming someone for sharing their lived experience (especially form their childhood) is not in keeping with HN terms.
Crazy the attempts to normalize the calls for mass killing because 'it's desired revenge killing with historical context'.
They are very clear that they want American and it's society destroyed. It is not just a chant. This is literally 'don't believe what they say, don't believe what they do, don't believe your own ears' level of denialism. But because my country is rich/powerful, I am not allowed to call out their actual words? 10 year old me was not allowed to be impacted by their leaderhsips words/actions (i needed to understand the historical context of their desire for revenge killing)? That is your entire premise. I am to rich/powerful to have a right to call out those calling for my death/my societies destruction in revenge?
The 'some' are the countries leaders, religions leaders, and huge amounts of their followers, and has been going on for 40+ years and is 40+ years as the official government position. And it is a call for death of hundreds of millions, the majority innocent of the actions done. You hide a lot behind 'some people chant'. Trumps words were vile. Irans 40+ years of religious leaders words, political leaders words, and civilians chanting in the streets words, are vile as well regardless of what the country the USA has done.
They also call the same chant for Israel right after the USA. Does Iran not really want Israel and it's society gone/destroyed/people killed? Their proxies murdered/maimed/injured/raped thousands on Oct 7th. Sure seems like they want what they say and are happy when they can cause bloodshed. Israel is much smaller than Iran, so by your logic (8 million people versus 90 million), you believe Iran is in the wrong for calling Israel out? The Islamic Republic of Iran has spent billions surrounding Israel with their Islamic religious proxies who consistently direct attacks at Israeli civilians. Israel had to invent a whole as sci-fi missile shield in order to protect their civilians from Iranian attacks via their proxies. 'Iran doesn't mean death to Israel'? Does anyone believe that? But when they precede it with 'death to America' somehow you want us to believe that is a totally different context?
Our household income is 300k, and I took a big risk purchasing a home in Socal where mortgage is 50% of our take home income. In a space of 1 year or so, we went from saving two out of four paychecks each month, to sinking two into mortgage each month.
For me, we have one kid and we plan to stay put for at least 10 years. It's a good school district. The quality of life is excellent considering the weather, outdoors, cultural diversity, things to do, and proximity to international airport. We have friends and family here.
But to me what mattered most is that I am 40, our income is going to plateau. Renting is good advice, but in 5-10 years, we won't be able to afford rent here, let alone buy. On the other hand, I can refinance now and bring my mortgage down to what I was paying for rent previously, and in 10-15 years be mortgage free at a place with all the benefits I mentioned above.
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