Central planning is making the rent too high. The UK isn’t rich enough for stuff to be expensive because of extremely high demand. Its expensive because it’s too hard to build stuff.
It's a Chinese psy-op. There are legitimate reasons to want to regulate data center noise, but that's an eminently solvable problem. The out-of-proportion reaction you're seeing is driven by misinformation.
At this point I really can't see any other justification. The amount of misinformation and hysteria around this issue is like nothing I've seen before.
Do you think the author realizes that gas turbine makers already sell aeroderivative turbines because the core power plant of a gas turbine generator and a jet engine are very similar?
My Bangladeshi parents were in London in 2023 and they were shocked by the number of immigrants. My mom was very upset because it blew up the idea that the immigrants would act and talk exactly like British people who just happened to be less sensitive to the sun. They’re retaining their differences, they’re participating in politics in ethnic blocs, they’re raising their kids with their own culture and values. It’s the opposite of what her generation had hoped for—London becoming more like Dhaka instead of Dhaka becoming more like London. This is because you’re letting them in too fast, in groups that are too large.
You’re also letting in the wrong kind of immigrants. You want immigrants who dislike their home countries and want to leave and westernize. You don’t want to take refugees, who are generally people who are forced by external circumstances rather than internal motivation to leave their homelands.
I think that's the point. I don't think assimilation was the goal. You can just see why people want immigration. It's purpose is to create ethnic blocs with distinct cultures. The West kind of built up this gigantic resistance to itself, I suspect, because of Nazism (or the reaction to it in anti-Nazism/anti-fascism to be precise). I think the belief is that Nazism is an inevitable form of the west that has to be stopped with intervention by the state. I think that's evil and don't believe that myself. But clearly a lot of people do. Around the time of JFK's victory, immigration was also viewed as an asset for the growth of urban politics. So immigration is a tool used by a postwar elite to maintain power.
> My Bangladeshi parents were in London in 2023 and they were shocked by the number of immigrants.
Surreal comment. Tourist: "There are so many tourists here"
> it blew up the idea that the immigrants would act and talk exactly like British people who just happened to be less sensitive to the sun.
Was that ever a requirement for immigration?
Of course they're not going to 'act and talk exactly like British people'.
> You’re also letting in the wrong kind of immigrants.
Yes, South African racists are a much better demographic.
> You don’t want to take refugees, who are generally people who are forced by external circumstances rather than internal motivation to leave their homelands.
As a grandson of people who were at some point refugees: this is utterly despicable.
Yes, that’s how immigration was sold and it’s the pillar of the moral case for it. The pitch was that differences were purely superficial—like actors wearing different costumes at Disney World—such that it would be irrational to have any feelings or judgment of them. Maybe they’ll like to eat curry instead of beans on toast. But it would be irrational to judge someone just because they eat curry—many British people eat curry too!
This concept that the differences are superficial such that judgment would be irrational was central to the moral case. If immigrants are more than superficially different in terms of social, cultural, and civic thoughts and behavior, then it’s rational to oppose immigration purely on those terms. Judging superficial differences is irrational, but judging substantive differences is rational. You can judge whether, say, different attitudes towards extended family are better or worse for civic life in a democracy, and whether you want to participate in the same democracy with more people who have different attitudes than your own.
> You have an entire generation of people in the west socialized to think that a Bangladeshi will be just like a British person soon as they set foot in London.
It did not appear from your comment that this was a person in the west socialized to think like that but another immigrant who thought like that. Which makes it a completely irrational response. The fact that they weren't tolerant themselves of others like themselves is what makes it utterly surreal.
If there is one thing I'm proud of for NL (and I can't speak for the UK, I haven't spent enough time there but I have spent enough time in Canada to have some idea of how things work there) then it is that for the most part people here get along. My kids have friends across all cultural groups here and they visit there and those kids visit here. Never a single issue.
The only issues that we do still have is a lot of latent racism in small towns and concentrations of crime (across all cultures, including those lily white Dutch) related to drugs and such. The people that want to blow this out of proportion are the ones on the far right, typically their main reason for their stance is that they are afraid that new entrants are going to compete with them for social security. And to some extent they have a point.
But refugees should always be permitted to flee from wars, famine, natural disasters and whatever else can happen to people outside of their control.
I'm Dutch but I left the country long ago though I still regularly visit.
But I think the Netherlands is taking too much credit for being tolerant. It's not anymore. It was in the late 90s but I'm the 2000s things changed and lately it's particularly racist and intolerant. Not just against immigrants but also LGBT minorities especially trans people. I find the so called 'funny' memes from the people I still know there despicable. And I've already discommunicated the worst ones in this regard. Lately even people who were formerly nice have become rabid racists.
And in a recent election the extreme right won more than a third of the votes.
Where I live in Spain it's honestly a lot more tolerant. Although even here the extreme right are on the rise, unfortunately.
That is a problem all over Western Europe, which is really annoying. The extreme right (and unfortunately also the not so extreme right) is fomenting a lot of this, but fortunately on a local level they are not yet very effective unless you go into the smaller towns. I spend a lot of time in two places in NL, a small town (40K population) and one of the larger cities (by Dutch standards) 300K pop. Obviously there is a world of a difference between the two but overall, and compared to other countries that I'm familiar with I'd say we are still doing ok. Whether it will remain like that I would not dare to say. Agreed that LGBT minorities, trans people have it harder than it was a few years ago and this really irks me. Again, here too the extremists are pushing for this and in turn they are making a lot of people feel like this is now normalized again to the point where they no longer need to hide their bigotry. At the same time: this was always there, it was just better hidden.
Another problem is that the rise of social media has given bigots the world over a large enough echo chamber that they feel supported, even though their direct environment does not support them.
> Lately even people who were formerly nice have become rabid racists.
This is not something I have seen yet but that could be luck of the draw.
> And in a recent election the extreme right won more than a third of the votes.
Indeed they did. But: that percentage wasn't all that different in previous years overall, if you add up the various splinter groups. They were just less vocal and they did not have international ties the way they do today. This is an extremely dangerous development.
> Where I live in Spain it's honestly a lot more tolerant.
I believe you.
> Although even here the extreme right are on the rise, unfortunately.
Yes, it is like a cyclic thing that is driven by the loss of lessons learned from the past. NL is in a particularly difficult spot here with our history in Surinam, former dutch Indonesia and the slave trade. We've done some very ugly things and a lot of that required de-humanization of other people to a degree that it still stains our culture in a very significant way.
Lots and lots of crimes were committed, lots of mistakes were made. It will take many generations to come to some kind of new equilibrium. It certainly won't happen in my lifetime, and probably not in my kids' lifetimes either.
concentrations of crime (across all cultures) related to drugs and such
The way you phrase it suggests that the crime problem is independent of immigration, which is just false. For example, children of two foreign born residents are 5 times more likely to be criminals than children of two native Dutch people. The people have every rational reason to oppose immigration if such a rise in criminality is the outcome.
> > The only issues that we do still have is a lot of latent racism in small towns and concentrations of crime (across all cultures, including those lily white Dutch) related to drugs and such. The people that want to blow this out of proportion are the ones on the far right...
> The way you phrase it suggests that the crime problem is independent of immigration
Not really. It’s still possible to “blow this out of proportion” even if the distribution does not factor along immigration status.
> The people have every rational reason to oppose immigration if such a rise in criminality is the outcome.
It’s not rational to respond to a 5x prevalence (simply using your figure for the sake of argument, and assuming that future immigrants are similar to past ones) as if it were 10x or 100x, and that seems closer to jacquesm’s point.
The fact that your account still exists after all of these things you write is a complete mystery to me.
I am small minded? Coming from you that's pretty rich, but fine.
The fact that you believe that I can't see the virtues of my society is rich too, I can see them just fine, there are many, and that one in particular is one that lots of societies have to come to terms with. Dutch tolerance is fairly well known by those who settle here from other countries. It gives us a far richer experience and makes life much more interesting. Yes, it also causes issues. But those issues are by and large problems created by inattention to the things that matter from a governance point of view. If you have an influx of poorly educated and poorly adapted people then you need to do something about that, you can't just shrug it off. And we do that. Not perfectly, and lots of lessons learned over the years. But just like people are complaining about Moroccan kids today they were complaining about Turkish kids a few years ago and against Surinam people some years before that. Integration takes time. Generations.
My kids will not conquer the world at your command. They will not forcibly teach others to think and act like Dutch people. That's insane. If they do leave NL and spread out across the world I hope they will bring with them some respect rather than a conqueror/colonist mindset. I hope they will be able to keep their eyes open, see opportunity and to be able to adapt to changing circumstances without wanting to force 'the dutch' way other than by example.
The Romans conquering Western Europe may have been good for Europe. But it was even better for Rome. Rivers of blood ran through these countries. Going by the outcome of such things can be used to justify anything, from genocide to plunder. No ethical framework has ever been successfully built on a utilitarian basis.
> Dutch tolerance is fairly well known by those who settle here from other countries
Yeah but it doesn’t make society itself better. It papers over a problem that’s created by immigration policy in the first place.
What’s impressive is the aspects of Dutch culture that you could copy to make other countries better and more successful. If I could magically flip a switch and import aspects of Dutch society into Bangladesh, I’d import Dutch orderliness, rule of law, cleanliness, eating culture (lunch sandwiches instead of wasting time with curries), etc. Tolerance wouldn’t even be on the list, because it’s a solution to a problem we don’t even have.
> Integration takes time. Generations.
I agree! Most immigration proponents aren’t willing to admit that, but you’re right!
So why undertake that burden? Why do all that work to, what, just get back to the same level of civic and social functioning you were at to begin with? (If you can even do that?) Why? Because you like difference and novelty for its own sake? That’s irrational.
> My kids will not conquer the world at your command. They will not forcibly teach others to think and act like Dutch people
I know they won’t. They will allow Europe to regress to the global mean instead of fighting to bring the world up to a higher standard.
> The Romans conquering Western Europe may have been good for Europe
That’s like saying: “ask liberal white people how well it works to aspire to be kindred spirits of black nationalists.” Or telling liberal Christians that, despite their efforts, many Muslims still consider them “infidels.” Liberal whites obviously don’t hold their opinions in order to ingratiate themselves to non-whites or non-Christians. Likewise, their political opinions obviously aren't swayed by the fact that some people in their coalition dislike white people or Christians.
You're smart and well read and these are the counter examples you come up with? I've got another one with similar real world applicability: ask the pastry chef who wants to hang with the gluten intolerant.
But pastry chefs can hang with gluten intolerant people. Butchers can also hang with vegans! And political parties often are comprised of people who do not like each other, but agree on political goals.
Mate, wait until you hear about how British immigrants integrate or rather don't, overseas - oops, sorry, I mean expats, which is they prefer to call themselves.
Yeah, and it pisses off the locals everywhere they go. Now imagine if they did all that and also were from cultures that didn’t know how to queue properly.
You can’t “bully” a continent that is entirely dependent on you for its security. The Ukraine war has proven that Europe is utterly incapable of putting out a fire in its own back yard without American military and financial support.
The article addresses that in the last couple of paragraphs.
"In effect, the administration is promoting European rearmament and European defense cooperation while simultaneously promoting politicians who oppose rearmament or defense cooperation."
The fire was largely started by the US - first Clinton getting Ukriane to give their nukes to Russia in return for US/UK security assurances, then Nuland lobbying for them to overthrow their Putin puppet then Biden being wishy washy about any defending.
And now Trump's cut all the aid so Europe + Ukraine is having to deal with putting it out.
They really arent. The people capable of starting wars are invested in industry a lot bigger than military. "Wars are for profit" is something people blindly repeat but has no basis in reality.
> U.S. Oil Industry Earned over $130B in Profit During Iran War (nytimes.com)
> Trump aims to increase US military spending to $1.5 trillion by 2027
> EU member states' defence expenditure sharply increased between 2021 and 2026. In 2025, member states' defence expenditure reached €418 billion, rising for the 11th consecutive year. In 2026, it is expected to reach an estimated €454 billion. This means that defence expenditure has increased by 75.3% compared with 2021.
Now compare those numbers to what they earn outside of war and its not out of the ordinary. No one is starting a war in Iran over $130B and I cant comment on Trump 'aiming' to do something as he lies more often that not.
EU defense spending is a tiny fraction of their total spending so I'm not sure what your point is there.
Most events have some people who benefit and others who are hurt but that doesnt suggest that the people who benefit have a hand in starting those events. There needs to be some actual evidence for that to even be considered.
Russia would have been very easy to handle. No fly zone over Ukraine from the very start. The US could have closed the skies over Ukraine early on (as requested by Ukraine) and almost instantly put an end to the war before it got rolling. Putin would have thrown a giant tantrum, and then promptly backed down and sought peace talks. The US could have shot down every single jet & bomber Russia sent over the line.
War with Russia does not mean nuclear war with Russia. As we can clearly see from what Ukraine is doing to Moscow et al.
Also, an aggressive stance in fighting Russia, would have caught them early on when their military was entirely a disaster. The beating would have been an epic humiliation. Instead Russia has spent years re-learning how to wage war, which is not what you actually want.
"no fly zone" is one of those things that sounds obvious but if you actually think about it then it doesn't mean anything.
What mechanism gives the US the power to tell Russian planes where they can and cannot fly? The US cannot simply mark an area on a map. It would have to, at a minimum, deploy a series of surface-to-air missile sites to actually shoot down those planes that violated the map.
Presumably a combination of SAMs and fighter planes. The US couldn't put a no fly zone over Russia, but a no fly zone over Ukraine would be pretty straightforward (even just flying out of Germany). A no fly zone doesn't need to be perfect to work. If you shoot down a couple planes (or even have fighters in the area), you make every future flight by Russia a massive risk.
> but a no fly zone over Ukraine would be pretty straightforward (even just flying out of Germany)
It's anything but straightforward.
Ukraine is about 800 miles east-west and 550 north-south; Rammstein's another 800 miles from Kyiv. At Mach 1.2, you're talking about an hour to get to Ukraine and another hour to get to the eastern extent of it, plus the time it takes to go to an in-flight refuelling aircraft multiple times along the way.
It'd be equivalent to trying to establish a no-fly over the whole of Texas, basing out of Chicago, while there are SAM sites in Mexico and California waiting to shoot you out of the sky and aircraft launching missiles from within Mexico with the chance of starting WW3 if you retaliate.
The number of aircraft you'd need would be massive - not just fighters, but AWACS, tankers, search and rescue, you name it. You'd have to have coverage all the way down whatever corridor you were using to get aircraft in and out of the area too.
Now sure, you could (instead of scrambling to intercept) fly combat air patrols over Ukraine and shoot down anything that comes in which might reduce the time-to-intercept to something more acceptable. You still have to cover a massive amount of airspace though!
A lot of the complication is reduced by the fact that modern air to air missiles have 100+ mile ranges (so you don't need a traditional intercept). You also don't need 100% coverage. Rather than covering all of Ukraine 24/7, you only need to cover an unpredictable part of it such that flying is risky everywhere. Getting basing in Poland (or Keiv) would obviously help reduce the flight time and awacs amount needed.
To be clear, I'm not saying it would be politically easy or low risk. It would almost certainly result in a couple fighter planes being shot down.
To be fair, I think it's moot either way because the Russians aren't (as far as I'm aware) sending manned aircraft into Ukraine in volume any more (probably in no small part due to PAC-3s but also the MANPAD threat). Instead, they're lobbing missiles from Russian airspace or sending in low-cost drones.
> To be clear, I'm not saying it would be politically easy or low risk.
Agreed, I think the biggest issue is the political and strategic risk. In the early days of the war, there was a lot of "it worked for Iraq, just set up a no-fly" chat though.
It would also make the US an active participant in the war. The US would be directly at war with Russia, and the US would have started the war between the US and Russia.
Declaring a no fly zone would have achieved nothing. Sending air forces to enforce it would have done something. But what happens if American fighter jets engage Russians over Ukraine, while Russian air defenses support their air forces from their side of the border? Would Americans let Russians launch SAMs with impunity, or would they invade Russia, showing the world that Putin's justification for the war was in fact correct?
Maybe Putin would have chickened out when American jets show up, but you can't know that for sure. Which means you should probably decide in advance you far you are willing to escalate before you chicken out yourself.
There is nothing "weak" about standing up for your own economic interests. The H1B program has largely been based on a fiction--using a handful of superstars as marketing cover for tens of thousands of mid-skill developers. But with AI now coming for everyone's job the pretext of a "skills shortage" is unsustainable.
Mid-skill developers? It's now become common to just contract out dev work to folks in Eastern Europe, for example. There are exceptional people there. And it's now really hard to get them to the U.S. so instead of having them pay taxes in the U.S. and spend their wages in the U.S. and maybe found their own startups and thereby grow the U.S. economy, they just do all that in their home country.
All that immigrant hate is so short sighted, it's hard to believe that you think that's actually in your own interest. Both common sense and history disagree with you.
(Though I admit that xenophobia has evolved in ancient human societies for good reasons. No reason to not realize it's bad though, not just morally but economically too. Very suitable for populism though, clearly.)
Immigration implicates economic and cultural issues, trying to reframe them as being about "hate" or "fear" is misdirection. When you see second and third generation immigrants waving foreign flags in western countries, you should realize that, even if you don't believe in nationalism, the immigrants themselves often do.
Similarly, dismissing the concerns as "short sighted" is just ignorant of history. Plato was thinking about the challenges of reconciling immigration with democracy 2,000 years ago. Alexander Hamilton presaged the destabilizing effects of immigration on democracy at the inception of the U.S. https://www.iwp.edu/articles/2016/12/21/hamiltons-actual-vie...
> When you see second and third generation immigrants waving foreign flags in western countries, you should realize that, even if you don't believe in nationalism, the immigrants themselves often do.
Indeed, that is a problem. The fraction of such folks is rather small though, if you take an honest look at the statistics. It's quite rare to actually see this, apart from videos at politically leaning talk shows or youtube or a rally of certain folks. At least in a menacing way -- nobody takes issue with a Swede waving their flag on midsummers eve or some 6th generation irish folks getting drunk on st patricks day eh?
It needs adressing nevertheless, I'm with you there. Helping immigrants to integrate better rather than just dumping them into ghettos would be an idea. But it's rather unpopular especially in affluent neighborhoods to let little blond caucasian princess share school with the dark skinned kid whose parents have a strong accent and don't celebrate christmas. Integration sure, but not at the expense of my precious darling!!!1
> nobody takes issue with a Swede waving their flag on midsummers eve or some 6th generation irish folks getting drunk on st patricks day eh?
A member of my wife's family is Swedish American. Her Swedish identity is superficial, a historical curiosity. Swedish Americans aren't glued together in any meaningful way by a common identity, they don't seek each other out to live near each other. Nor can you influence them by appealing to their Swedish heritage. By contrast, I have on multiple occasions gotten comped meals from hotel workers based on being Bangladeshi. Bangladeshis in the US and Canada feel real affinity for each other--they live in Bangladeshi neighborhoods, marry within their communities, etc. And you can influence them by appealing to their shared identity.
Irish identity is largely superficial today, but for a century it wasn't. They lived in Irish enclaves, they did favors for each other based on shared identity, and they organized politically based on ethnic background, not ideology or issues. And that had real social and political consequences for the country for a long time.
Indeed, Americans underestimate how different Irish and Swedish Americans really are from Anglo Americans even today. Americans descended from different European countries remain quite different in fundamental attitudes (e.g. social trust, views towards saving, etc). And they still vote quite differently as a result. It's also obvious just going around America. As a foreigner, it's blatantly obvious which parts of the country was settled by Italians, Scandinavians, Germans, different kinds of British, etc.
I think this is largely a function of when those waves of immigration happened, and how long ago it was. In another hundred years we'll see the Bangladeshi-American descendants having a fully superficial, historical curiosity type of connection to their heritage, like you describe for the Swedish-Americans. It just takes a few generations.
Studies show that 50% of the variation between cultural attitudes in European countries is still present in descendants of those people in the U.S. If you look at which communities have the highest levels of social trust, conservative attitudes towards spending and saving, etc., it’s exactly the places you’d expect based on where those same attitudes are prevalent in Europe. And obviously we’re starting from a much larger cultural delta with Bangladeshis to begin with.
But even putting that aside, there was a lot of pain for “generations” when we had Irish and Italian enclaves and the ethnic political machines they created. So we put up with that burden for 50-100 years and for what? To get, in the best case, a Bangladeshi version of the Jersey Shore?
> how many cuts to education or defense spending save social security?
You can't save it by cutting education or defense spending. By 2036 the combined social security and medicare shortfall is projected to reach $2.7 trillion. If defense spending stays at around 3.1% of GDP--it has been decreasing as a share of GDP since the 1990s--then the shortfall in medicare and social security will be about $1 trillion more than the entire defense budget.
The notion that we need to achieve utopia here before moving forward is so toxic. If people in the past had thought that way, we'd still be trying to make the perfect village in Africa.
"Humanity" isn't a preschool classroom where we all hold hands and do one thing at a time like the teacher says. It's fine for some people to be working towards the future while others are trying to fix things in the present.
This seems like a response tediously intent on missing the point: if you genuinely want to build a sustainable settlement on Mars, you should start by proving out sustainable settlements in harsh environments on Earth -- you could build out sustainable settlements in the Antarctic, the depths of the Sahara, and under the ocean all with substantially less expense/risk than trying to build a sustainable settlement on Mars. You'd learn how to build better sustainable settlements by doing so and encounter some of the problems you'll encounter on Mars with less dire consequences. And you don't have to choose one or the other: you can parallel path it by continuing to improve rocketry while building up sustainability strategies in harsh environments on Earth. The fact that Musk is intent on reaching Mars as the only difficult problem just underscores that he is not serious about settling Mars (or, perhaps, that he simply isn't that bright).
There is no reason that people who want to take on a ridiculous challenge shouldn't.
> ...you could build out sustainable settlements in the Antarctic, the depths of the Sahara...
That isn't an argument. I don't know what that is.
People who die on their way up to Mount Everest could .... ? People who spend their lives playing games could ... ? What a strange way to think.
Its good that different people really do want to do different things. Some of the best of have been taking on unbelievable challenges, pass or fail, live or die, since history began. Celebrate it.
You are right that for any interplanetary human expedition a prerequisite is to be able to make a closed environment for humans, where carbon dioxide, water, food left-overs and almost all other waste products generated by humans are recycled, producing free oxygen, potable water and food.
However, this does not mean that other required technologies, like for transportation or for protection against dust, cannot be solved before.
I also agree that recycling technologies are actually more important than spacecraft technologies, because they are equally applicable on Earth, not only on the path to other planets or in bases established there.
I do not believe that interplanetary travel will be possible for humans otherwise than in spaceships with artificial gravity produced by rotation.
This not only would avoid the health problems (the experiments on mice in the ISS imply that a gravity as high as 2/3 of that of Earth might be necessary for preventing harmful effects during long-term missions) but it would also simplify many of the recycling technologies, because handling fluids and powders is difficult in weightlessness. It would also simplify the growing of plants or fungi.
High correlation with the pill (birth control) and increased participation in the workforce by women. Also cross reference with wealth inequality levels.
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