kava

I've worked all over the rust belt / bible belt in a little over a dozen states doing large construction projects. At least for my industry, the vast majority of the laborers are illegals. They don't disappear after getting paid. I've worked with some regularly for over 5 years.

From what I've heard from people in California, your experience is not typical

Undocumented immigrants don’t “do the work legal citizens aren’t willing to do” or “work harder than legal citizens”. Those are both racist liberal talking points

majority of my life was spent as an illegal immigrant. i've been embedded in illegal immigrant communities my whole life. i've worked with many and have known many more

it's my experience that both of those statements are true.

a) they do work citizens aren't willing to do and b) they work harder

i can elaborate on why I believe those things are true, but absolutely if I'm looking for a laborer for specific types of work.. I will always avoid the native-born citizen.

whole ecosystem of fear is designed to keep immigrants working jobs below minimum wage and/or in appalling working conditions

believe it or not there are many illegals that make wages higher than what most americans make.

there's many types of illegal immigrants. there's not one size fits all to make generalizations. but the majority of them are similar to oil drill workers.

a working class male goes far away to a labor-intensive job that nobody wants to do. they do this because they can make a relatively large salary and then use that money to do something back at home.

so for example Mexicans will come and work in construction. They can make upwards of $300+ a day of work with experience. this is many times more than what they could reasonably expect in Mexico. but not only that, they're making more than many native born American citizens.

it's just lower skilled Americans tend to flock to low salary and low effort jobs like retail or food service.

We have never had machine learning algorithms that exploit human psychology to give precisely timed hits of dopamine. Algorithms that know you better than your family members do.

I think in the near future we're gonna be looking at the modern social medias similar to how we see smoking cigarettes today. Addictive and bad for you.

I wonder if he's gonna actually do it. An actual real concentrated effort to remove illegals would cause serious problems.

Inflation would spike, lots of industries would slow to a crawl, certain commercial areas would be essentially destroyed.

For example, in many different fields of construction the majority of the hard labor comes from illegals. Big companies hire contractors who then hire contractors who use illegals because they are much more productive than Americans and you can pay them less.

If we get rid of them, they would have to both dramatically increase their labor cost and the projects would slow down.

That would raise the price of doing business which is inevitably always passed down to the consumer. Then you have certain areas with ethnic markets and ethnic restaurants and such. Many of those would lose half or more of their business overnight.

This would be so disruptive it's hard to understate. And I know Trump knows this.

That's my burning curiousity right now. Is this whole thing similar to the Wall™ ? A symbol that isn't meant to accomplish anything meaningful beyond giving the droolers something to point to? Or is he serious?

If he's serious, we're about to begin a radical shift. He would not be doing this if he wasn't ready to radically change things.

now trump will use the killing to push a hardcore agenda of police and constant surveillance to make sure it won’t happen again

see, I think if Trump did it he's gonna go a different route

he's gonna harness the populist support for this killer and he's gonna go "we need universal healthcare because Americans are suffering"

and he will be seen as a hero and cement his dictatorship

First. You can’t know if it will substantially change under new management. That’s speculation

you would fundamental shift the power structure of the company. in one instance, it's a company that ultimately answers to Chinese investors and the CCP.

in the other, it would answer to American executives and the US government.

the incentive structures are wildly different between these two. for example, if it's an American company and the NSA comes knocking asking for data... they are under much more pressure to quietly bend over.

i think it's absurd to say the company wouldn't change. if the company wouldn't change, they wouldn't be forcing ByteDance to sell in the first place. they are forcing the sell because they need TikTok to change

Third. They can and have already been shown to subtly manipulate the algorithm to artificially elivate China’s image

yeah, they want to be able to subtly manipulate the algorithm to show pro-US propaganda instead.

forget about free speech and rights to association and all that, i guess

well, two things can be true. he could have committed serious crimes and it could be a case of the DOJ being used a political weapon.

realistically most people who do the things Hunter Biden did get away with it just fine. It's perfectly fine to be a criminal when you are part of that group. so if he weren't Biden's son, he would be fine (although he also probably wouldn't be receiving millions of dollars from Russian convicted criminals).

honestly, I think it's one of the final nails in the coffin of our democracy.

i think a lot of people need to start paying attention to what happens in Brazil. I've been seeing so many parallels. We had Jan 6th, they had their own Jan 6th a year later.. except a more intense version

A few years back, the president conspired with the justice department to try and put the opposition candidate in jail. the thing is - the opposition candidate was corrupt. but the whole trial was orchestrated not to seek justice, but to put the guy in jail so they would win the election.

the trump-like candidate in Brazil got attacked in a crowd. helped him win an election. Trump got shot in the ear, helped him win an election. etc

so many parallels

we're seeing similar weaponization of the justice system here

couple of things

1. I'm assuming you mean Trump and as of now he is not the president
2. Once Trump becomes president after Jan 20th, he will be just as much my POTUS as he will be your POTUS, assuming you live in the US
3. I think you are trying to make the insinuation that somehow because I answered the question asked by OP, I am a Trumper

I spent the majority of my life as an illegal immigrant in the US. I didn't become a citizen until well into my adulthood. I was brought here illegally at a young age

do you really think I am a Trumper? that I'm a red hat wearing Maga bible thumper? i would be a traitor to my own kind- being damned to spend eternity in the lowest level of hell freezing right next to Marco Rubio and Judas

come on man stop drinking the koolaid it's OK to admit Biden's son is a criminal.

Let's see. Biden was charged with and pleaded guilty to 3 felony counts. One count of tax evasion and two counts of filing false returns. And then 3 misdemeanor counts of willful failure to pay taxes

Everyone's favorite actor Wesley Snipes got charged and convicted of 3 misdemeanor counts of willful failure to pay taxes. significantly less than Biden was charged with.

he got sentenced to 36 months and served 28 months

this guy: https://www.justice.gov/usao-md/pr/former-baltimore-police-commissioner-darryl-de-sousa-sentenced-federal-prison-failing

baltimore police commissioner served 10 months along with community service and probation. he got 3 counts of willful failure to pay taxes

so what is the typical? it really depends. there's a lot of nuance to it. but Biden is/was facing some serious serious charges. 3+ years of prison would probably be the minimum expected

the police commissioner tried to hide about $60k of taxes from the government

Biden tried to hide $1.4M

so yeah, I'd be really grateful to dad if I were him

such a silly semantic statement

TikTok exists in its current manifestation because it is managed by ByteDance

If you sold TikTok to an American company it would immediately change into a different entity.

If we're gonna play word games I'd call it a "anti-foreign social media ban"

now i'll ask a question

are they banning it because it's competition for our social media companies? so is this an economic anti-china policy designed to protect american company interests?

or are they banning it because right now TikTok is one of the larger social media platforms and it's the only one that doesn't have to bow down to the DOJ or DOD? i don't think it's a coincidence they're banning the platform with some of the loudest leftist anti-government voices

I don't buy the national security angle one bit. It's like pretending the PATRIOT Act was to protect kids. It's a veneer. Scratch off the surface and you realize if China wanted data on Americans, they can just buy it legally and cheaply from American data brokers

yeah i just try not to think about it. I'm glad I was in the myspace generation during my teenage years. so I was actually able to just delete my myspace later on as an adult

i feel worse for the kids growing up today. they don't fully understand the implications of what they are posting online. anything and everything is being recorded forever. my generation got a chance to be a stupid kid and have it be forgotten. today's kids don't get that opportunity

the best you can do, though, is just stop posting potentially damaging things online. you can't change what you already posted. and 999 times out of a thousand, it's not gonna hurt you.

i understand the overwhelmed feeling though

the topic of this thread is Biden pardoning his son, who was guilty of serious financial crimes.

you're the one being selective in your outrage, not me. i disapprove of all these guys.

the thing with Biden though, is that the DNC frames themselves as the good guys. You know, Trump is a corrupt criminal, bla bla bla.

So when Trump does, it isn't really a surprise. It's what you come to expect from someone like him. I'm not approving of Trump's pardons because I'm mentioning Biden's

The issue is that Biden promised various times that he would not pardon his son. But now that he has nothing left to lose (his career is over, and probably the country is doomed to fascism anyways) so fuck it. Integrity is for schmucks anyway, right? i guess the moral of the story is make sure you have a powerful dad

personally I'm not even outraged about it. I'm glad he did it so that it's more clear to everyday Americans that they're all a bunch of crooks