I truly love the country of México - I have spent a large periods of time there for the climate, as a place to work and have a wonderful life, away from the chills of winter. I often thought about making a permanent relocation, but this terror is too real and I found myself living in constant anxiety of my friends and colleagues being in danger, and the fear of speaking your mind weighs on you after a while. I am saddened because the people, the food, the weather, the architecture (particularly D.F.) makes for a crazy, exciting mix where the wealth and treasure of history and (deserved) national pride contrasts with poverty and the political and social conservatism that goes alongside. México: may things improve for you, though I really have no idea how that will happen.
> I truly love the country of México [...] but this terror is too real and I found myself living in constant anxiety of my friends and colleagues being in danger
To be fair with Mexico, those issues don't affect the whole country. Mexico City is pretty safe for example.
My friends are thinkers and challengers of the system: it's for them I am more worried, that they can't speak freely. I could move to Condesa and live a protected life, but that's just colonialism (using my spending power to put a cocoon around me with Uber and private parties). That's not the México I'm interested in. I've also been mugged rather violently there anyway on Calle Amsterdam, (though no worse than Barcelona for example, being in the wrong place or time) and I've had Mexican friends sitting in traffic going to work, having a gun pulled on them for their wallet.
I'm not really sure how safe Mexico City really is, once you get out of the ex-pat bubble.
My very limited experience with Mexico City is that I'd treat it like many U.S. cities: it's fine, if you know which areas to avoid after dark, and which areas to avoid entirely. It is not like a safe European city center where you can go almost anywhere alone on foot at any time of day. But most U.S. cities don't fit that description either. And it's not at the other extreme that some people imagine, some kind of Somalia-esque set of private compounds separated by lawless warzones.
Well, there is a huge difference between Europe and the US/Mexico: most people don't have guns. You will rarely see anybody with a weapon here. If you get attacked, it will be with fists, sometime a knife. Having the possibility that somebody pulls a gun on you is crazy to me, like something that should only happen in a movie.
Mexican gun control laws are far stricter than anything in Europe. You can get years in prison for even a single unauthorized bullet.
Mexico is a case study of how gun control can lead to an increase in danger for the population. Gun control can be nice in "civilized" places, but in Mexico, even the police are on the take. Justice in Mexico consists of avoiding the "Justice System" at all costs.
I lived a year in Chapala and even there we had cartel shootouts where police were among the bad guys. If you are a potential victim of violence, the police are the last people you'd usually call. It's often every man for himself -- so that results in nearly every house having high walls, razor wire fences, bars on every window, "alarm dogs" on rooftops.
My wife if from Guadalajara and we spend a lot of time there but it isn't Texas. In Texas, a home invasion is often met by a bullet from the homeowner, in Mexico you just better hope your wall is harder to climb than your neighbor's.
That being said, Mexico IS a great place -- but it's great because of the culture and people -- the government on the other hand, is a disgrace. The odds of it every changing are slim to none because part of Hispanic culture is a sense of fatalism and "it's God's will" kind of thinking. Mexican Catholism bears a huge blame -- there's a conditioned helplessness. Not to mention the cartels are among the Church's biggest benefactors! This isn't the thinking necessarily among the more cosmopolitan Mexicans, but that represents a minuscule minority. However, even among the educated, there a overriding sense of pessimism -- starting a business in Mexico is quixotic -- as soon as you get some income, everyone starts chipping away at it trying to get their share.
I can't speak on the relationship between the Church and the cartels specifically, but many of the wealthiest narcos are significant social benefactors in their home regions. It's a brilliant strategy - it legitimizes their organization in the eyes of the citizenry, by addressing real needs that the state has failed to fulfill, and in so doing simultaneously delegitimizes the state.
For example in Sinaloa, El Chapo's home state, he's regarded by many as a "Robin Hood" figure because he's built schools, churches, hospitals and more in impoverished mountain villages that receive little to no aid from the state. In return, he was for years able to move freely and conduct his business with impunity from Sinaloa, without having to worry about locals betraying him.
Living in the Netherlands, I know that people with bad intentions most likely have guns.
Even in my small hometown, a citizen that owned a spy equipment store got shot up in daylight in front of his home.
Other example would be people getting robbed in their house with guns (not daily, but it happens).
There are plenty of other examples... I cannot say I feel 100% save most of the time.
It might not make you feel better, but Holland's gun death per 100,000 is in the 0.5's compared to the U.S.'s 10's and Mexico's 10's.
You're 20 times more likely to get killed by a gun in the US or Mexico.
Note that in the whole of Holland there are 50 gun homicides per year, so you were actually pretty unlucky to experience that. Your experience is exceptional and not a common occurrence, especially as I assume most Holland murders are not widely reported spouse killings, etc.
Mexico had 18,398 gun homicides in 2011, for comparison, Holland, 60, US, 11,068.
The US has roughly 110 guns per 100,000 people and 4.5 gun homicides per 100,000 people.
Mexico has over 20 gun homicides per 100,000 people and about 18 guns per 100,000 people.
Canada has 2 gun murders per 100,000 people and 31 guns per 100,000 people.
Mexico: each gun is responsible for 1.11 murders
US: each gun is responsible for .04 murders
Canada: each gun is responsible for .07 murders.
Interestingly, the Bahamas has 30 gun murders per 100,000 and about 4 guns per 100,000. That's 7.5 murders per gun.
France has 2.8 gun murders per 100k and 31 guns per 100,000. Which makes each gun responsible for .09 murders -- slightly higher than both the US and Canada, despite far stricter laws.
The U.K. Has .23 gun murders and 6.6 guns -- so .35 murders per gun.
Sweden has 1.47 murders per 100k with 31.6 guns for a rate of .047 murders per gun.
Nicaragua has 4.68 murders with 7.7 guns -- each gun is part of 1.65 murders.
Jamaica: 31 murders/8 guns.
Denmark: 1.28/12 guns
Israel: 2.09/7.3 guns
Brazil: 21.2/8 guns
Australia: .93/21.7 guns
My point: gun ownership does not correlate to gun murder rates -- in fact one could make a case that increased gun ownership could actually reduce gun murder rates.
Despite having more guns per capita than most countries, the overall US murder rate ranks 108 out of 218, with Honduras topping the list (incidentally Honduras has 67 murders and 6.2 guns per 100,000)
I think you're making the argument that with more guns, countries tend to have fewer gun deaths per gun. This makes sense, casually. However, I doubt that anyone cares about the number of gun murders per gun, but rather the total number of gun murders, which is (please correct me if wrong) still correlated with more guns.
Also, I see that you've focused the discussion on gun murders, which is fine, but we should note that decreased gun ownership does lead to far fewer gun deaths, mostly by reducing suicides.
Does it matter what weapon the murder/suicide was committed with?
Yes, fewer guns mean fewer gun deaths -- but does it mean fewer deaths in general?
If fewer people own Honda Civics, then fewer people will die in Honda Civic accidents. But that dip in Honda Civic deaths would likely be absorbed into deaths by all other car models, such that the overall death rate remains the same.
Around 265 million guns ("more than one gun for every American adult") and an estimate of 55 million gun owners in the US. Interestingly, some 7.7m gun owners make up for half of all guns.
Guns are mostly concentrated in Southern/Midwest states. Most people do not own guns in the North and coastal states. Besides people living in the sticks, I don't even know anyone who owns a gun in the New York State city I live. I'm 36 and I've never shot a gun before! http://reverbpress.com/politics/firearms-per-capita-by-state...
Guns are a solution in the right hands, that's what the founders believed, and if these stats are correct it proves that they can be used responsibly if society is stable enough. I think we're approaching a time though when guns will be a net negative, but by then, the USA will cease to exist as we know it today.
All you've done is the old trick of twisting data until it supports what you desperately want to be true because you like owning a gun. Remember, there are far more ways that the data shows you're wrong than support you.
Like climate change deniers, the only scientists that support lesser gun laws are the ones that the NRA pay for. Your congress even defunded independent research as the "wrong" result for the lobbyists kept coming out, more gun control, much less death.
> You're 20 times more likely to get killed by a gun in the US
This is very misleading because this audience is primarily middle class/rich white/asians employed in the tech industry.
There are 2 primary factors in homicide rates. Be poor or be a certain race. If you are not either of those things, your chances of being murdered in the US is very low.
*edit 3 factors -- men. Women don't get murdered often.
How is it misleading? Are all Holland's gun killings well-heeled white techies? Why wouldn't those same factors apply in Holland? I haven't looked at stats but I'd take an educated guess that the economic/ethnic divides also apply in Holland.
You've also made the same mistake as another commentator (I admit I wasn't clear), my first figures are total gun deaths, including self-harm. A significant percentage of those deaths are white men killing themselves with guns. As I understand it, a figure that only partially translates into other forms of suicides in countries or states with better gun control (basically, less guns = less suicides, other methods need more preparation and so are caught in time or fail). A brief google seems to support that:
Proportionally speaking, the factors probably hold, the cold, hard, truth is that as a white techie you're still much more likely to die by a gun in America or Mexico than in Holland.
Your own state department warns about Mexico:
U.S. citizens have been the victims of violent crimes, including homicide, kidnapping, carjacking, and robbery in various Mexican states
You can search for US citizen deaths in foreign countries:
There are 4 factors.. emergency services and doctors. Fast responders, can save a gunshot victim from becoming a thread to officials via statistics, and allow him to have a happy vegetative state existence ever after.
Same thing applies Mexico -- if you're not involved in the drug trade or law enforcement, your odds of getting killed are almost nil.
Mexico welcomes over 20M tourists a year from all over and almost all make it back home safely.
I have to say, you are really over exaggerating. Gun violence is just not a reality you have to be worried about here. Amsterdam is nothing like any US city where I've lived(in terms of violence on a daily basis), and The Netherlands as a whole is extremely safe.
Here you can see the gun death rate in The Netherlands per 100k inhabitants is 0.58, but there's some areas in the US where the rate is quite comparable.
What really sets things apart is the suicide rate, most deaths by guns in the US are by suicide, but there's counties in the US where there's easy access to guns and the overall death rate is lower than the Dutch gun violence + non-gun suicides.
So in a lot of cases it's not that just having guns makes everything hyper-violent. It's just that if people feel like killing themselves they'll use the best available instrument available to them.
Conflating that with general gun safety as it pertains to you feeling safe walking around Amsterdam, but not in a comparable town in the US, is silly.
I'm sorry, but the lowest group for that US graphic you linked is higher than the number of the Netherlands (0.58 gun deaths, 0.29 of which are homicides, both per 100k). The lowest groups are 2-7 and 0.5-1.4, respectively, both of which are significantly higher than the value for the Netherlands. In fact, your link shows the exact opposite of what you claim: there isn't a single county in the US that has lower gun death or gun homicide ratio than the entirety of the Netherlands. That's an exaggeration, too (there isn't data for all counties), but it doesn't diminish the point that you're by far less likely to get shot in the Netherlands than in a comparable US city.
You're misreading the graph[1]. The 2-7 grouping is all gun deaths, homicides, suicides, and accidental deaths.
If you hover over individual blue counties you can see the breakdown by homicide and suicide rate for some of them.
E.g. Washington, NY has a gun homicide rate of 0.46, gun suicide rate of 5.14. Meanwhile The Netherlands has a gun homicide rate of 0.29, gun suicide rate of 0.28, but an overall homicide rate of 0.7[2], and an overall suicide rate of 8.2, while the US has a suicide rate of 12.1.
Does The Netherlands still come out better? Am I cherry-picking by comparing county-level statistics v.s. entire countries? Yes and yes.
But for the point I'm making it doesn't matter. The point is that there's a common misunderstanding, particularly among mainland Europeans, that the mere availability of guns in the US results in a drastic increase in the homicide rate.
This is simply not supported by the data. What the data does show is that if you're going to kill yourself or others you're likely to use the best tool for the task, whether that's a gun or a knife.
Does the ease of availability of guns in the US make it easier to kill people, and cause some murders that otherwise wouldn't have happened? Yeah, but it's hard to tease that out of the data, it also prevents some murders.
What we do see from the data[2] is that there's lots of countries with much more restrictive gun policies that have higher homicide rates than the US, and furthermore the occurrences of gun-related homicides in the US don't at all map to whether the area has more liberal access to guns, but whether there's a general crime & poverty problem there.
Lithuania has a significantly higher homicide rate than the US, 5.5 v.s. the US's 3.9, but just 1% of homicides there are gun crimes[3].
However I've never heard anyone say to my Lithuanian friends that they were lucky to get out because of the obscene murder rate there, but I've heard my fellow Europeans make comments like that to some of my American friends when it comes to gun crimes.
Pretty sure I'm not. The 0.58/100k figure for the Netherlands includes all gun deaths, too. Washington, NY, has a population of <64k people. Yet its gun homicide rate is still 58% higher than that of the Netherlands. And that's for a county that you picked to show that the situation in the US supposedly isn't as bad as I think.
The fact remains that the US have a gun homicide rate of 3.43/100k, compared to the Netherlands' 0.29/100k (12x), Germany's 0.07/100k (49x), France's 0.21/100k (16x), the UK's 0.06/100k (57x), or Spain's 0.15/100k (23x). That's an order of magnitude difference for all of these countries, with two major EU nations (they haven't left yet! :P) at about 50x fewer gun homicides than the US! Only three EU countries—Italy, Portugal, and Greece—have less than 10x fewer gun homicides, at 0.35, 0.42, and 0.53 per 100k, respectively, or in relative terms: 9.8x, 8x, 6.5x fewer. How is that not a "drastic increase"?
The gun homicide rate in Europe is drastically lower than in the US. That's non-debatable, the data shows it beyond any doubt. So is total homicide rate, albeit by a smaller margin, as per your link, with the US at 3.9, two to four times higher than most EU countries. Singling out Lithuania is misleading.
I'm not going to go into whether access to guns increases suicide rates due to opportunity, that's another discussion. Let's stick with the homicides here.
The "glad you got out of that hellhole" comments you note could be due to movies and TV shows. There is a lot of gun violence in US productions, it's not hard to see how that could create an association for people who haven't lived there.
This reply is correctly refuting an argument that I'm not making. If I was saying that the gun homicide rate anywhere in the EU & the US was comparable I'd be wrong, as you say it's off by orders of magnitude.
What I am saying is that comparing homicides by weapon type ignores the big picture, which is who cares in the end whether you're killed by a gun, a knife, or bludgeoned to death? You're going to be just as dead.
The availability of guns in the US means that when there's a homicide or a suicide it's vastly more likely to involve a gun than in the EU, but people focus on that statistic and assume that magically taking away the guns would drastically improve the situation.
That's not supported by the data. The people of Lithuania, which for some in the US would match some ideal they have of restrictive gun laws, manage to kill each other at a higher overall rate than pepole in the US, even though they have gun restrictions to the point where only 1% of those homicides involve a gun.
So yes, if you look at the US by firearm related death rate[1] alone it looks like a 3rd world hellhole. But comparing countries by death rate by specific implement makes no sense. Instead you have to look at the overall homicide rate[2] and the overall suicide rate[3].
Once you do that, several countries in Europe look worse when it comes to homicides, and the US is exceeded by the likes of France when it comes to overall suicide rates.
Again you single out Lithuania, completely ignoring that most European countries have a homicide rate that is 2–4x lower than that in the US. Let's just check a few: France 1.2, Germany 0.9, UK 0.9, Italy 0.8, Spain 0.7, Poland 0.7, Austria 0.5, Switzerland 0.5, Netherlands 0.7, Belgium 1.8, United States 3.9.
How do you look at this data and conclude "yup, the EU is just as bad as the US"? Instead you focus on the Baltic states and the Balkans, which is not what people commonly have in mind when you refer to Europe.
And no, we're still not talking about suicides. They are completely orthogonal to homicides. Stop injecting them into the discussion.
I'm not concluding that "the EU is just as bad as the US", and really, I can't see how you could possibly come to that conclusion after reading my comments.
Yes, on average pretty much any part of the EU is better when it comes to homicide statistics. All I've been pointing out that from looking at the homicide & gun death statistics in the US you can't conclude that guns are important variable driving those statistics.
> we're [..] not talking about suicides [...]
> Stop injecting them into the discussion.
You're the one who started injecting suicides into the discussion. In your earlier comment[1] you said, in response to a graph[2] I posted that included non-suicide numbers, which is the part I was citing, that the "lowest groups are 2-7". Those numbers include gun suicides, whereas I wasn't talking about that at all but the other data on the page which shows gun homicide statistics similar to the Dutch 0.58.
But since you muddied the water by bringing up these unrelated suicide numbers, I started to itemize the suicide & the non-suicide you were conflating them with, and now a few comments later you're complaining about my discussing something you brought up in the first place.
Man, I have to ask if you even read past the first sentence of my comment... Yes, I'm sure that the homicide rate of Rotterdam may be higher than some podunk midwestern town. What I said though, is that I feel safer living in Amsterdam over some of the US cities where I have also lived. Your statistics show that ALL of these cities(DC, Philly, NYC, SF, and LA) are objectively more dangerous to live in than Amsterdam.
I'm sure you are trying to dispel something you see as a common myth, but maybe you should try having a conversation instead of giving a sermon.
People with bad intentions most likely don't have guns in the UK. Some people with bad intentions will, but they're the people who're risking everything in the first place, not the people who'll get a couple of years if they're caught.
You are less likely to attack someone if there is the risk that person has a gun. Just like you are less likely to speed in your car if there's a cop driving next to you.
> You are less likely to attack someone if there is the risk that person has a gun.
I don't believe that. I think that the calculus of whether to attack someone skips the "is the victim armed?" question. You just make sure to bring overwhelming force, e.g. bring a gun to a (probable) gun fight or a knife to a fist fight.
But what do I know. I'm just an European wuss, who has fire a handgun exactly once.
My wife was attacked and she was caring a gun. People who attack people are fundamentally not good at risk reward cost benefit analysis.
The deal is if you carry, which I did for years, you have to maintain above normal situational awareness. You have to be able to get space. Cops can do this because they arrive after the fact and get to enter the situation with the appropriate threat posture. If I have a gun and I get into an altercation the moment i'm in physical contact with the other person the gun doesn't matter. The long and the short of it is if you can be prepared and have "the drop" on someone a gun is a great way to protect yourself. That is why I feel the shotgun at home is a good idea concealed carry an overall liability.
Source. I lived in the 14th most dangerous neighborhood in the us for 15 years and carried a gun most of the time.
This presumes criminals think this through. Largely criminals exist because they didn't or couldn't think it through. If they must have money to feed their child or their addiction they will attempt to mug someone, they might pick the lowest risk target or the first target. Let's not presume these people have lots of options, if that were true most wouldn't be criminals.
A search on his name brings up Dutch results that badly Google translate into English, but it seems (from what I can decipher from a translation) police suspect he may have been shot after being suspected of passing on info related to another criminal investigation.
Yes, British firearms law changed after the Dunblane massacre [1] to outlaw handguns. The Hungerford massacre [2] in the 80s caused the outlawing of semi-automatics. I live in rural England, and many friends and neighbours have shotguns and hunting rifles. I was surprised to discover that a couple of the rifle owners use silencers too. Silencers do have a legitimate application; they confuse the directional hearing of the prey, so a hunter can get off a second or third shot at deer before they start running.
It seems that for the first time in generations, the US is looking at loosening restrictions on guns. There has even been a law introduced to remove silencers from the NFA, which would cause them to be treated much like guns in and of themselves as opposed to how they are treated now.
Most people who are into doing criminal things actually have guns here in Europe. Our open borders allow people to drive a trunk full of guns from Turkish border directly to Berlin, and they regularly catch guys doing that.
Only the people who get attacked don't have any guns, and they get fucked up.
> Most people who are into doing criminal things actually have guns here in Europe.
Speaking for the western part: no they don't. No even close to the majority of criminals have guns (I don't dispute that they have easy access, though). You'll be hard pressed to find street robberies at gun point in Germany, France and the northern countries.
You'll be hard pressed to find street robberies at gun point in Eastern Europe too. Subjectively, it is much safer to walk on the streets of Warsaw, than Berlin.
My brother live in frankfurt and even in the worst part in the city, with people injecting heroin in the street, you never get even bothered by anybody.
In France you hear about guns, but I lived in 8 different cities there, and I never been near any gun attack. None of my friends or relatives either.
If you have gun here, people look at you in a strange way.
Everytime me or my bro got in trouble, it was fist fighting. I got a knife once. Some of my friends got messed up. Fist again. In france, the UK, germany, Italy and spain.
I don't say there are no guns. I'm saying that it's not even of the same scale of occurrences than in the US.
> Only the people who get attacked don't have any guns, and > they get fucked up.
If you fail to take regular firearm training, combat training or to acquire the necessary mindset for a gunfight under live threat, then you are even more fucked if you try to use that gun you are carrying to make you feel safer...
I remember reading some anecdote from an Iraqi at the peak of the war. They talked about how most of the time you're totally safe, but every once in a while a bomb will go off and a bunch of people will die.
There's a spectrum of danger that a lot of us have had the privilege to not experience. I could imagine getting mugged in some places in Europe, but not really imagine dying in the "mugging gone wrong => someone is dead" scenario you hear about in the US.
And of course the idea that I might get killed in a traffic stop is something I have the privilege to not experience.
The majority of the US has a murder rate comparable to Canada. The US has particularly extremely tilted murder rates based on location. Relatively small areas with hyper murder rates very substantially skew the numbers. A couple dozen neighborhoods in Chicago for example combine to account for about 2% of all murders in the US (with murder rates 50 to 100 times the national average).
A minimum of 95% of the US population live in areas with murder rates comparable to Canada (around 1.5 to 2 per 100,000 depending on the year). More than 200 million Americans live in areas with murder rates under 2. That's not impressive compared to the nicest parts of Europe, but it is very impressive compared to Latin America and Europe's largest country, Russia.
> but it is very impressive compared to Latin America and Europe's largest country, Russia.
"Better than Russia!" isn't much to brag about when it comes to social niceties. Given that the US starts out at half Russia's homicide rate even before you filter out anything, it seems like you're intentionally selecting a very bad comparator to make it look good.
And given that 17 of the top 20 homicide-rate countries are in Latin America, that's an even worse comparator. Indeed, the top 4 countries that are around double #5 and below, they're all in Latin America. You couldn't ask for a worse comparator - being better than the most extreme outliers isn't "very impressive" in the slightest.
Likewise, if you're pulling the trick of "oh, don't include the bits where the crime really happens", you need to do the same to the other countries you're comparing against. They have crime centers as well, and it's not an apples-to-apples comparison if you don't treat them similarly.
what's the murder rate measured on? Chicago is already almost 1% of the population, so I don't see how the murder rate per capita is 50 or 100 times the national average.
Also "200 million Americans don't even live in areas with bad stats" is another way of saying "100 million Americans live in areas with high murder rates"... seems like a larger issue than you're implying
right, I get that. But is it like.. 10% of Chicago? 1%?
If it's 20% of Chicago but has 50-100x the national per capita average, that's pretty crazy. If it's one house where everyone in the house was murdered (1 murder per capita!), well it's not really representative of much.
I'm not sure about Singapore, but Doha and Dubai are the both capital cities of a monarchy: Qatar and UAE, respectively. Keep that in mind if you ever visit.
I lived in the UAE for ~14 years, so I can give you some idea of how safe Dubai is.
- You can leave your car in a parking lot for hours, unlocked, with expensive devices clearly visible. Nobody would even come close to it.
- There is no need to lock your house when you leave. People usually do though, because it just make sense to do so.
- You can walk virtually anywhere in Dubai at any time of night, completely alone. Nobody will bother you.
- The UAE has some of the friendliest police I've ever seen. Oh, and they are extremely professional and responsive, and are insanely good at what they do [1].
In my 14 years living there, I have never once been robbed, have never even witnessed a crime or robbery, nor have I ever heard of someone (e.g., friends) falling victim to one. The only incident was a break-in at the home of a family we knew. That's it.
I think you are willfully missing the point. You cannot compare Dubai's "Safe" to other place's "Safe" because other places view things like woman being raped as "unsafe" and Dubai does not.
Being an Indian construction worker, means being more likely to be killed institutionally. For example by ridiculous hazards at work that any other "Safe" place outlawed decades ago. It could also mean being arrested, harrassed and deported (or arrested and thrown in a hole, I don't know; racist gulag numbers are not exactly officially published) for speaking out of line.
Let's not even touch religion.
You are perfectly correct that Dubai is "Safe" for some definition of "Safe" suitable only for White or Arabian, Muslim or rich Christian Men.
That's exactly the point. I am not including the government in my definition of safety. Rather, the focus is purely on safety from an illegal point of view (murder, rape, robbery, etc.).
This is not a very good way to look at things, because a place without any law and order would be "safe" by these standards. If rape is not illegal, women being raped is allowed. If murder is not illegal, people being stabbed or shot to death would be just the normal way of life.
"Yep they commit atrocious humans rights violations and systematically abuse migrant workers, but at least you can leave your car unlocked." And Mussolini made the trains run on time.
I've been living in Abu Dhabi (capital of UAE) for the last 12 years and although I started getting more and more annoyed with the country, I can absolutely confirm what you're saying. Safety is almost always at the top of the pros/cons list.
Haha, that sounds like back home in western Maine, if you're a local who isn't a known drunk or stoner. Even then, you can leave everything unlocked, without fear
They didn't have much choice. The new territories had to go back because they were leased. So all that they could have held on to was Hong Kong island and Kowloon. There wasn't the infrastructure to maintain those areas. And China was a very different place in those days, the insane crap that they said to the British during handover negotiations made anything Donald Trump saying today look intelligent... It was a stressful time to be living there. So today Hong Kong is a Chinese colony instead of a slightly (yes, slightly) more benign British colony.
Slightly? As far as I know, the United Kingdom is a democracy while China is an oppressive, imperialist, authoritarian state under oligarchic rule, with complete disregard for human rights or the cries for independence and democracy from its dependencies. Would it be ruled by Britain instead of China there would be a world of difference, don't kid yourself.
Can you name a democratic country with 1 billion+ people that has achieved what China has in such a short period of time? Nope. Do you think China would have progressed the same if it wasn't managed as an autocracy?
Nope. Read my comment again. Here, I'll make it easier:
> Can you name a democratic country with 1 billion+ people that has achieved what China has in such a short period of time? Nope. Do you think China would have progressed the same if it wasn't managed as an autocracy?
This article is more about systemic state corruption though and not petty street crime. There's still gangsters in Singapore and Hong Kong, and if you worked at a newspaper writing about them and their connections to politicians you would have problems. If you decided to start writing about the prostitution racket in Dubai you could disappear pretty quick too.
Maybe I was lucky, but I never felt in danger in major US cities walking literally everywhere. While in D.F. I had some anxiety outside of central roads.
It's hard to give some objective analysis, but I don't personally feel safe walking alone at night in large areas of NYC, Baltimore, Chicago, Atlanta, Detroit, St Louis, Miami, etc.
Most of the Bronx, about half of Queens, about 1/3 of Brooklyn. Manhattan is mostly gentrified these days, with only a handful of exceptions. Staten Island is odd b/c it is barely walkable to begin with, so it's neither safe nor dangerous to walk.
Everything is relative to what you're used to I guess. I'm from a Canadian suburb, where a 16 years old girl who got attacked in a dark alley at 3:30 am while alone made the news for 3 months because that was the worse thing that had happened in decades.
Now I'm in Boston, in a heavily gentrified area, and I'm scared shitless after 11 pm. People all tell me it's a super safe area, but I know a few people who got mugged a few blocks away in various occasions.
Maybe it's just bad luck. Maybe compared to other areas, a few people getting their backpack stolen is nothing. But feelings are not always rationals. I don't feel safe here.
Homelessness is not a root cause for things; it is one symptom of fundamental problems that people have. Other symptoms include aggressiveness and unpredictability. These other symptoms may also be at least a partial reason why the people are homeless.
Not all nor even a majority of homeless people developed countries are aggressive or unpredictable, but the risk is higher. Around here most of them are quite tame and humble, at least most of the time, and I'd much rather use the word "weak" than "bad", though.
But yes, homeless people can be scary. Being a stranger in SF, I was somewhat alarmed when driving in the city and finding myself in a central neighbourhood where I wouldn't want to stop at the red light.
Not been to Mexico City, but I have been in many US cities (NYC, L.A., SF, San Diego, Salt Lake…) a variety of times during a 15 year span. One time I will never forget I was on the bus from the L.A. airport to downtown, and chit-chatting comes out that I was staying at hostel downtown. A couple of reactions were priceless, like I were a dead man walking.
It was perfectly fine in the end.
The thing is if you are showing bling in some form or simply being unaware, you are at risk _anywere_ in a city. Hell I got cash-robbed inside a Times Square restaurant when I was 18, thinking I was getting a good deal on a Sony ultra slim CD player with 30 seconds skip buffer.
Yea, but that's like restricting NYC to Manhattan. I wouldn't feel that unsafe walking the majority of Manhattan at night either.
Or for another city center, I go downtown inner harbor/fells point/federal hill Baltimore at night plenty. Most city centers in America are perfectly safe any time of day.
If the goal is to prove that going to some godforsaken suburb miles out into the countryside is dangerous, sure. This is true in any country. But not if you live in an actual city.
As a Cornishman, this is basically what's taught in the schools, yes. You live in a godforsaken suburb miles out of London but you pretend that, unlike us, you somehow live in a city. ;-)
Pretty much every major city worldwide has large suburbs that have their postcodes and are administered by the same municipal government, but they're clearly not included in the "European city center" designation. They are part of the city, but not part of the city center; and for a multimillion city the difference (and distances!) are significant.
don't agree with berlin either, of course some areas are more criminal (almost anywhere), but going on foot alone is still possible, even at night and i've been to most of the trouble-spots.
Also: Munich, it's unbelievable safe, more boring than berlin, but safer.
Personally I feel that Berlin gives off an unsafe feeling on your first few nights but you as you stay longer you start to see there is no reason for it, I mean I remember going past a train station at night and some guy was playing some pots as drums, while some man sat cross legged with a beer listening. And another time walking up a dodgy back alley into a lively square with an outdoor cinema
I've been around central Berlin a good bit and honestly never had such a problem. If anything I end up with the opposite problem, I'm the foreign hipster who hasn't kept up with the trends enough to realize that this area has gentried sufficiently that I am no longer welcome here, because it's now an area for rich West Germans.
Speaking of Italy, you'd be hard pressed to feel endangered in Rome, Milan, Turin etc. Naples can get a bit sketchy, but even then. Switzerland and Austria also seem pretty relaxed in my experience.
Trieste seems pretty sketchy too (easternmost major city in Northern Italy). I was traveling from Milan to Croatia, got all mixed up on trains, and got in to Trieste at about 8pm with no connecting bus to Croatia until the following morning and most hotels/hostels full for the night. Dodgy people walking around and weird vibe in general. Luckily I got a ride out that night.
I really enjoyed Trieste during the day a couple of years ago, delightful and historic. Haven't seen much of it at night though. It's not unlikely it's got a larger percentage of folks coming through from the Balkans / Eastern Europe than other Italian cities due to its position. There's been tension in the country in the past couple of decades due to inbound migrations from that area.
This is why I prefer to live in parts of the US that resemble the demographics of most European city centers. It turns out that tends to be kind of a demographic optimum...
I've been living in Mexico for 8 years. I'm from Europe and married to a Mexican woman. I've lived in a couple different states (DF, Edo. Mexico, Queretaro, Veracruz, Quintana Roo).
I've never once felt not safe, or seen violence.
I see the news and I really wonder if I'm living in a different country.
European married to a Mexican woman (From Monterrey) here as well.
She realises that there are bad things in Mexico, but sometimes she actually feels more scared here in Europe due to the terrorist events that have happened lately. Though there has been only one in my country, she really hates going to Brussels.
As she tells me, it is worse with terrorism because it involves civilians minding their own business, whilst most of the terrible news from Mexico actually happens due to narcos and not to random civilians on the street.
As I have not lived in Mexico, I can't really compare the two. But by the sounds of her and her family, it's not as bad as the news would have you believe. (Or, alternatively, they happen to live in a good part of Monterrey / Mexico).
I have pretty much the same story (but 4 years) and lived in Sonora and Nayarit. I have close friends living in Sinaloa (expats of 20 years).
I now live in Guanajuato, and the only crime I've heard of first or second hand in the years in mx was a worker taking some cash which was laying around, and some gringo's stealing from each other.
On the other hand I lost three friends in hurricane Odile, so I guess don't forget nature can be a much bigger threat if not given enough respect.
I realise this is a bit of a late comment and you might miss it. But is there any way to contact you? As I mentioned earlier in the thread, I am married to a Mexican woman and I was wondering what it is like to live in Mexico as a European (Specifically software engineers, which you might happen to be as well ;-) )
>may things improve for you, though I really have no idea how that will happen.
I think a good first step would be changing attitudes towards drug use. We should treat users as patients instead of criminals. And waging a 'war' against dealers and smugglers has only made them more violent and dangerous, while driving up prices and making those who survive even wealthier. There needs to be smarter policies.
I think America should stop buying drugs from Mexico, shipping them guns and promoting the violence.
Garry Webb and Michael Rupert were two amazing reporters that brought to light the reality of the CIA funded cocaine trade from South and Central America, and most people today have either never heard of them or dismiss them as crazy. The reality is the CIA still funds itself with cocaine and still causes violence south of our border for the industries that would benefit. United Fruit, Bay of Pigs, the 1973 Coupe of Chile, School of the Americas... the list is as long as you want to make it.
This is occasionally obfuscated, but it is utterly true. There are basically two kinds of guns (of the kind you can use to enforce this "war") in the world stage: AK-like (Russian, eastern European, and Chinese included) and AR-like (MXX(X) and modified civilian, from dealers and left over from military/agency operations). The AR-like guns are extremely common in Mexico, and they obviously are all American made. There are also a lot of AK-like weapons, which are... also all American. Bare minimum, they are legally bought in the US and smuggled into Mexico.
These facts are often overlooked by claims that you can't be sure where the guns come from- 87% of the 4000 guns we can track come from the US, but that only represents 12% of the 30,000 guns seized. The real fact is the Mexican military has seized over 300,000 guns[1], and very few of those AK-like guns come from Russia or China. The overwhelming majority of those weapons had to have been built or sold in America.
In the US there's a huge amount of disbelief that we can actually be the source of these guns. I honestly think that comes from a mistaken belief that guns actually exist everywhere... America is a giant gun store, the biggest on the block, saying they need to keep selling guns because of all these guns everybody keeps buying.
There are good arguments for border patrol but this is not one of them. These guns are legal in the US and all you have to do to get them into Mexico is load them on a catapult and drive out to the middle of nowhere, or load them in one of the hundreds of small boats that make the trip. It's trivial to find guns illegally coming into mexico from a boat that can cross oceans and nearly impossible for a boat you can make in your garage. Border patrol will not solve gun violence in Mexico any more than it will solve cocaine in America.
As an unrelated thing, I find it mind boggling that immigration is still an explicitly national issue in America. Refugees and immigrants would be much better handled if they were done on a per-state basis. If California wants to let in a ton of Mexicans and issue them state-only green cards, why should Texas be able to vote to stop them? Likewise if Texas wants to exclude immigrants, why should California force Texas to give them jobs?
State-only green card programs would allow immigrants to be carefully tracked (national green card holders face deportation if their residence is not on file), gives them incentive to go from states where they aren't wanted to those where they are, and allows national money and patrol efforts to be focused where they are wanted. Immigrants can't steal Texan jobs if they live in California.
You could make a single-state work permit without internal borders. If workers from California want to spend their vacation money in Nevada, let them. You can still reject them if they apply for work in another state.
To make that effective you would have to eliminate federal birthright citizenship, or anyone could easily make their children US citizens (and then too many would).
The "state immigrants" would also have to be disqualified from all federal programs or unwilling states would still be paying for them.
And if that isn't enough to make it intractable, what do you expect to happen when an immigrant crosses into another state to commit a serious crime?
>To make that effective you would have to eliminate federal birthright citizenship, or anyone could easily make their children US citizens (and then too many would).
This is irrelevant; you can do this on a visa just as easily. Additionally, this exists for a reason even if you don't like it. If anything it reduces the incentive to do this, because you can get 99% of the benefits without doing it. Regardless all you have to do to make this birth-neutral is make it as hard to get a state green card as it is to get a visa.
>The "state immigrants" would also have to be disqualified from all federal programs or unwilling states would still be paying for them.
You are ignorant of the laws regarding legal and illegal immigration. Education, for instance, is explicitly provided to illegal immigrants. Social services almost all have a multi-year "pay-in" period. Additionally, immigrants pay more into taxes than they take out. I believe you are unintentionally arguing a strawman.
Also, those states don't get a say in what they do or do not pay for. Massachusetts pays for Alabama. In fact, Massachusetts pays for immigration control that they don't want. In reality this would be a doubly more fair distribution of federal taxes. Even hypothetically it's an insignificant change.
>And if that isn't enough to make it intractable, what do you expect to happen when an immigrant crosses into another state to commit a serious crime?
I don't understand what you're trying to say at all- this would no different from anyone else, citizen or not, committing a crime.
> This is irrelevant; you can do this on a visa just as easily. Additionally, this exists for a reason even if you don't like it. If anything it reduces the incentive to do this, because you can get 99% of the benefits without doing it. Regardless all you have to do to make this birth-neutral is make it as hard to get a state green card as it is to get a visa.
The whole premise is that some states want to make it easier than that. What is a state green card even for if it's just redundant with an existing H1B visa and doesn't increase the total number of immigrants whatsoever?
> Education, for instance, is explicitly provided to illegal immigrants.
And if the number of immigrants increases, so does the cost to the school system.
> Social services almost all have a multi-year "pay-in" period. Additionally, immigrants pay more into taxes than they take out.
Welfare is redistributive. (The programs that aren't are net harmful and do nothing but sell you your own money with bureaucratic waste and corruption-induced strings attached). Its purpose is to transfer resources from those who have more to those who need more.
The only way anyone should give more than they get is if they have above average earnings, which is true of current legal immigrants (because that's basically the criteria that gets them accepted), but not true of the typical unskilled workers who would be the apparent target of this program.
> Also, those states don't get a say in what they do or do not pay for.
Sure they do, in the US Senate. No federal money gets spent without majority approval from both houses of Congress.
To make this happen you need their approval.
> I don't understand what you're trying to say at all- this would no different from anyone else, citizen or not, committing a crime.
>The whole premise is that some states want to make it easier than that. What is a state green card even for if it's just redundant with an existing H1B visa and doesn't increase the total number of immigrants whatsoever?
Look, here's some perspective. The US annually admits:
65,000 H1B visas
70,000 Refugee visas
~200,000 nonfamily immigration visas
~675,000 undetected illegal immigrants
675,000 immigration visas total
9-11 million nonimmigrant visas
If you want to just drop a kid down so they become a citizen, it is a hundred times easier to do it on a travel visa and it always will be. Regardless of how many state green cards there are, it will always be orders of magnitude easier to get a travel visa, hop on a plane, and stay under the radar for a couple months.
The H1B visa is incomparable to a state green card on numbers alone, but it also puts this decision into the hands of a small subsection of employers, which is completely divorced from the desires of the states. It's basically different in every way.
When I said immigrants pay more into taxes than they take out that was was a statement of fact[1], not opinion. They pay the same taxes as us and see severely reduced benefits, even at very low incomes. Cut federal benefits entirely for them and require the states to pay if you like. It's a tiny problem.
As for political unpalatability over finances and scaremongering, there are still plenty of solutions. Forcing states to pay for their green cards is constitutionally tricky, but theres no reason those people need to get federal benefits. If cross-border crime and employment is a problem it would be pretty trivial to have an exclusion zone on the border of states that don't want immigrants. Immigrants wouldn't be able to have residences in that area.
> If you want to just drop a kid down so they become a citizen, it is a hundred times easier to do it on a travel visa and it always will be. Regardless of how many state green cards there are, it will always be orders of magnitude easier to get a travel visa, hop on a plane, and stay under the radar for a couple months.
That requires that you can afford to buy a plane ticket and then spend nine months not working while paying US cost of living and pregnancy-related medical expenses out of pocket, which puts it out of reach for most people in the world. An easy-to-get work visa turns the economics around.
And it's not just people who come here exclusively for that reason. More people means more children. If the additional people are unskilled laborers who make low wages and pay little in taxes, someone else has to make up the difference.
> When I said immigrants pay more into taxes than they take out that was was a statement of fact[1], not opinion. They pay the same taxes as us and see severely reduced benefits, even at very low incomes.
The article is only considering social security against itself. Someone making $20K/year is paying <$2500/year in social security tax. One child in public school is four times that in itself.
> Cut federal benefits entirely for them and require the states to pay if you like. It's a tiny problem.
Take away the federal money and the states won't be able to afford it. Or won't want to pay it. The problem isn't social security, it's schools and healthcare.
And it's not like you can just leave children to grow up without schools or let infections go untreated.
> If cross-border crime and employment is a problem it would be pretty trivial to have an exclusion zone on the border of states that don't want immigrants. Immigrants wouldn't be able to have residences in that area.
For many states (e.g. Pennsylvania, New Hampshire) a 100 mile exclusion zone would have multiple other states fully inside it.
>That requires that you can afford to buy a plane ticket and then spend nine months not working while paying US cost of living and pregnancy-related medical expenses out of pocket, which puts it out of reach for most people in the world.
Uh... It requires literally none of those things. You can get into the US on a car, train, boat, bicycle or a good pair of chanclas. You certainly don't need to be here nine months to have a kid. You can certainly find work in that time, and emergency medical care is "free". And while yes, it means more people, those people are a far cry from new immigrants and their numbers can still be limited federally. And regardless, with 12 million immigrants here already, the number of births won't be changing much any time soon.
I think you're rather missing the forest for the trees with the rest.
> You can get into the US on a car, train, boat, bicycle or a good pair of chanclas.
What does it buy you to trade one expensive ticket for another? I don't think you're seriously suggesting that walking here from even Central America is not a large impediment, to say nothing of the unconnected continents where the large majority of people actually live.
> You certainly don't need to be here nine months to have a kid.
The alternative is to get a travel visa when you're already pregnant, in which case the government can observe what you're attempting to do and deny the visa.
> You can certainly find work in that time
Working on a travel visa is illegal, therefore harder to do and lower paying.
> and emergency medical care is "free"
That implies going through a pregnancy with no access to non-emergency medical care (e.g. ultrasound), risking the life of the child.
> And while yes, it means more people, those people are a far cry from new immigrants and their numbers can still be limited federally.
Either you're increasing the number of unskilled immigrants or you aren't.
>Take away the federal money and the states won't be able to afford it. Or won't want to pay it. The problem isn't social security, it's schools and healthcare.
>And it's not like you can just leave children to grow up without schools or let infections go untreated.
Having actually looked it up, federal funding is only 13% of public education ie it would be absolutely trivial to require states to fund state green card immigrants. Likewise emergency healthcare isn't federally subsidized. Plus, it's highly unlikely that allowing this program would actually even increase the number of immigrants we have, just make the illegal ones legal.
> Having actually looked it up, federal funding is only 13% of public education ie it would be absolutely trivial to require states to fund state green card immigrants.
You're forgetting that the federal money goes disproportionately to schools in poorer areas, i.e. exactly the schools in question and the ones who can't afford to lose the money.
Well that's the other problem, isn't it? It is subsidized but the subsidies are indirect. Every time someone goes to the emergency room without paying, the price goes up for ACA-subsidized private insurance and Medicare.
And the same for the lack of non-emergency coverage resulting in people running around without vaccinations and carrying untreated contagious infections.
The only real fix would be for the state to pay for all the immigrants' healthcare.
> Plus, it's highly unlikely that allowing this program would actually even increase the number of immigrants we have, just make the illegal ones legal.
It can't not. The program makes it easier to be an unskilled immigrant. Supply and demand says if you lower the cost the quantity will increase.
If you set a quota at the current number then you aren't actually solving the problem, because more will come hoping to get one of the slots and then you have more people than slots. If you set no quota then the number goes up even more.
Title 1 federal funding is $1000 per disadvantaged student. It's an insignificant amount of money compared to state funded education. Any state funding is totally irrelevant because the states will decide that problems. Likewise healthcare is funded inside states. You're confusing the issues.
ACA premiums are a good point, as they do apply to permanent residents. Empirically this would result in decreases in costs due to preventative treatment, but politically it is a sticking point. Medicaid (not medicare, which is for retirees) is not affected.
Regardless, the point is not to engineer a perfect solution, its to make an improvement by moving the burden of illegal immigrants in red states to blue states. The burden is lowered more than would be otherwise be allowed. This would remove 90% of the burden.
>If you set a quota at the current number then you aren't actually solving the problem, because more will come hoping to get one of the slots and then you have more people than slots. If you set no quota then the number goes up even more.
The inflow of illegal immigrants is 25x smaller than the number of current illegal immigrants. The people who want to be here are already here. In economic terms the elasticity of human survival is very low. The supply is nearly constant regardless of how easy it is to get in and stay. 96% of illegal immigrants are here already. Even if it becomes twice as attractive to come into the US under this system, 92% of the people moving to blue states will already live in the US.
It is far more likely that this would be a minor attraction- the ability to get a social security card is a tiny improvement to your quality of life compared to escaping violence and poverty. It is far more likely that immigration, legal or not, will not be affected significantly. Even if this makes moving to the US 25% more attractive, 95% of immigrants will already live in the US.
> Title 1 federal funding is $1000 per disadvantaged student. It's an insignificant amount of money compared to state funded education. Any state funding is totally irrelevant because the states will decide that problems.
Total education funding per student is north of $10,000/year. Regardless of what percentage was state vs. federal, without the federal funding the state is paying the whole $10,000. That's the state's problem, but that doesn't give the state a solution. If you add a new child whose parents don't own any property to pay local property tax on, where does the extra $10,000/year come from?
> ACA premiums are a good point, as they do apply to permanent residents. Empirically this would result in decreases in costs due to preventative treatment, but politically it is a sticking point. Medicaid (not medicare, which is for retirees) is not affected.
They're all affected. If someone goes to the emergency room without paying, the cost gets distributed across everyone who does pay, including Medicare and private insurance. It doesn't matter that the person who didn't pay wasn't a retiree; the retirees and Medicare pay the resulting higher costs the same as everybody else.
> Regardless, the point is not to engineer a perfect solution, its to make an improvement by moving the burden of illegal immigrants in red states to blue states. The burden is lowered more than would be otherwise be allowed. This would remove 90% of the burden.
Figuring out how to move the burden isn't the hard part, it's how to shoulder it. California would lose the federal money, but at the same time become more attractive for the immigrants who are currently in Arizona or Nevada, which will increase the amount of services they have to provide (the whole amount, not just the federal share) even before there is any new immigration into the country as a whole. Where do they get the money?
> The inflow of illegal immigrants is 25x smaller than the number of current illegal immigrants.
The total number is derived from the inflow. If you double the inflow the result over time is to double the total number.
> It is far more likely that this would be a minor attraction- the ability to get a social security card is a tiny improvement to your quality of life compared to escaping violence and poverty.
There are many places you can go to escape violence. People come here for higher pay, which is exactly what being able to legally work most affects.
>Regardless of what percentage was state vs. federal, without the federal funding the state is paying the whole $10,000. [...] If you add a new child whose parents don't own any property to pay local property tax on, where does the extra $10,000/year come from?
That's a cost that people are very willing to pay. This system would allow states to choose exactly how many kids they want to pay for. You seem like you're trying to argue against immigration in general, which is beside the point. I just want states to be able to make that choice for themselves.
Even in the worst case, if states took in all new immigrants and paid for 100% of their public education, that would still be a better solution because it gives them the option of choice. Like I've been pointing out, it's very likely that we already pay for the education of 90%+ of the newly-legal immigrants we would experience, and the states already pay for 90% of that education. The current system forces states that don't want immigrants to pay for them- this system would reduce that 100 times. It's effectively deportation of 99% of the illegal immigrants in red states to blue states.
>Figuring out how to move the burden isn't the hard part, it's how to shoulder it. California would lose the federal money, but at the same time become more attractive for the immigrants who are currently in Arizona or Nevada, which will increase the amount of services they have to provide (the whole amount, not just the federal share) even before there is any new immigration into the country as a whole. Where do they get the money?
That's fully just an argument against immigration. You're saying that California shouldn't or wouldn't choose to accept more immigrants. I'm just saying they should be able to make that choice. Even if California suddenly decides that despite having the strongest economy in the US they are going to give up their beliefs in immigration, there is no downside to this system.
>They're all affected. If someone goes to the emergency room without paying, the cost gets distributed across everyone who does pay, including Medicare and private insurance. It doesn't matter that the person who didn't pay wasn't a retiree; the retirees and Medicare pay the resulting higher costs the same as everybody else.
So... nationalize them and make them join ACA, so that it's paid for. The current system is the one where their emergency medical care isn't paid for.
>The total number is derived from the inflow. If you double the inflow the result over time is to double the total number.
The short term -the period in which illegal immigrants are nationalized in blue states- is the only one that matters. Here's why: In economic terms we currently have deadweight loss. The political "price" of importing immigrants is too high- leading to undersupply in blue states and oversupply in red states. Once illegal immigrants are dealt with this system means that every state will be importing exactly as many immigrants as they want.
>There are many places you can go to escape violence. People come here for higher pay, which is exactly what being able to legally work most affects.
That's inaccurate. People come to America because there is nowhere else to go. We accept more people than any other area in the world- over twice as many as the EU until recently. Refugees from Syria and elsewhere come here because every other country has turned them away. Good or bad, that is a deeply historical characteristic of the US and its what most people want.
Central American immigrants fit the profile of economic migration better- the median income in America is 6x higher than in Mexico. On the other hand, America is the closest and safest country for those people, and just moving here definitely qualifies as "escaping violence". The top two countries by murder rate are Honduras and El Salvador, and of the top 20 spots 14 are in Central America/Caribbean and 3 are in South America. Even in Mexico the murder rate is 4x higher. Poor in the US can be dozens or hundreds of times safer than poor in central America.
I don't think so. What I'm thinking is that "state green cards" would let you live in one state, and your residence will be checked up on periodically. If you don't live there, or if you're found in another state without a visa, you become an illegal immigrant, and fall under the purview of the federal immigration services.
This has very little negative changes- since many/most illegal immigrants are here on overstayed visas (anecdotally, every one of the illegal immigrants I know), and because travelling from a state into inner states is so easy, it doesn't make enforcement particularly harder. Since immigrants have a readily available alternative in the states that want them, stricter enforcement of illegal immigration is much more justifiable.
All this system requires is that the federal government maintains and checks on a list of expanded green card holders (ie non-citizens) that are restricted to certain states. This system is already in place for normal green card holders. If you aren't where you're supposed to be, the feds start looking with you, with the added advantage of having a last known location, picture, description, identifiers, and information about your family and friends. It would be much easier to track people who entered legally, and justifies much stronger controls over illegal entry.
Hypothetical situation: California says "okay we'll take 30,000 Syrian refugees annually". The Feds screen, admit, and register 30,000 Syrians and tell them "Okay, you are not citizens- you can't leave California without a visa, you can't vote, and you might never become citizens. You may live and work in California as long as you pay state and federal taxes, and you can use public education and medicaid (after ten years). You will be tried for a felony if you leave California. We will check with your landlord, check on where you pay taxes, and stop by every 3-6 months to verify where you are". In return the refugees provide everything a normal green card holder does- name, identification, family, location, occupation etc.
Edit: the best argument I've heard against this is the deontological one. Essentially that the feds should be the only ones who control who enters the union, and that since they are the feds they can't contain people in one state. This argument completely disregards the possibility of the feds making deals with states.
You're right that overstays are a big problem. Now imagine how much worse it would be if every state got to choose who comes in. The federal government tries real hard to issue visas only to people who won't break the law. They're not entirely successful, but the bar is decently high.
The Syrian refugee hypothetical would have a different problem altogether. The opposition to admitting refugees isn't economic, it's about terrorism. If you can't stop a terrorist posing as a refugee from traveling from California to Texas then the only way to keep Texas safe from that person is to keep him out of the country altogether.
(To be clear, I think the worry over terrorists posing as refugees is just paranoia. But the fear is real.)
Like I said, the federal government would handle screening. States just admit a number of people, they don't vet them- the fed has primacy there because of national security and immigration control. Regardless you can replace Syrian with Mexican and probably should. I only said Syrian refugees for the sake of variety.
But again, as a national security concern it isn't a problem. As long as the number of state green cards is less than the number of visas granted, a terrorist will be much more likely to get a visa and overstay it if necessary.
How exactly are overstays a problem? It's just a person existing in a geographical area longer than the Mafia controlling it would prefer.
All this "theorycrafting" about how best to coerce people for the greater good is silly.
Blah-de-blah-de-blah the government this and the states that and then "we" make everyone do X and Y because Z and then there will be much rejoicing because people have been successfully coerced for the greater good!
Like if I show up at your door each day and force you to skip on one foot for 5 minutes, at gunpoint, that's good because you might not get enough exercise otherwise!
Anyone can see that would be crazy, but when you talk about some huge, gray abstract masses of people, then it's just fine to intervene in their lives in countless different ways.
How about "we" protect people from becoming drug addicts through a certain harmless "gateway drug" by threatening them with life-ruining prison sentences for using/possessing said gateway drug?
Oh wait, "we" tried that already. It didn't "work"[1], and actually WE had no say in any of it!
[1] Unless, of course, the real goal was to hand everyone else's money to the prison industrial complex, in which case it worked splendidly!
True, but there are some partial exceptions (Britain and France) and reality hasn't stopped people from pointing to the EU as an example of the system gone horribly awry.
Despite the lack of conditionals placed on EU immigrants, the lack of tracking and free movement, there has been very little migration from border countries that accept migrants willingly.
Actually there are Schengen border controls which are not the same thing. You cross outside of Schengen and you do border controls. Go from France to the U.K. for example -- even pre-Brexit.
It's very easy to make AK-like and AR-like guns. Even if it's correct that the majority come from the US, they certainly wouldn't have to. Many hobbyists even do this kind of thing, and it doesn't require any particularly special manufacturing equipment. My guess would be that the reason they seize more ARs than AKs is not related to the source, but because they find ARs preferable.
If somehow guns stopped flowing across the border, and cartels still wanted them, they'd be up and running in no time. I'd be surprised if they aren't already doing it, because they have other operations that require much more sophistication.
Preface: I know guns, I like guns, I am a competent machinist and I know all about lowers, gun laws, and the shovel AK. It is not easy to make guns. You need huge factories and while the cartels are theoretically capable of such things, its incomparable to US-based gun manufacture. Mexican factories can be shut down. Mexico can do nothing about guns that come from the US. They can do far less to stop it than we can do to stop drugs from coming into America, and we have been able to do practically nothing.
Manufacturing AKs requires can be done by a blacksmith, but you can't hire ten thousand blacksmiths to produce a gun each every day. You need stamping presses, metal casting, etc. and you will never make a gun as good as a factory. That's just ignorant thinking- the steel, the manufacture, the precision all matter.
>If somehow guns stopped flowing across the border, and cartels still wanted them, they'd be up and running in no time.
That's nonsense. People can make cars from scratch in their garages, but if you stop selling cars to a country they will very quickly not have any more cars. Guns are not that complicated but they aren't that simple. Zip guns have never and will never be a problem in countries with even a partially functional government.
This whole "we can't stop them from getting guns" is emblematic of the magical thinking I was referring to. The scale of the number of guns coming from the US is just way, way beyond what is practical or even possible in other countries. There are plenty of reasons we shouldn't stop guns from flowing into Mexico, but it is a real problem that would no longer exist if we didn't let US guns go to Mexico. There's just no way they would be able to get even a fraction as many guns, anywhere close to the same quality. The US is unique in the entire world for how many (and how many kinds of) guns it has[1]. It's not possible to just go to Russia or China- of the countries that have the most guns the only ones who don't buy them all from the US are Switzerland (where my family immigrated from, incidentally) and France, and they certainly aren't selling to Mexicans.
A small shop in Guadalajara was making AR-15 lower receivers, using a Hardinge VMC 600 ii CNC mill.[1] This wasn't the usual operation starting from "80% lower receivers"; they were machining the whole part from plain aluminum billets. The machining job lacks a finish pass, but probably works.
There are some surprisingly primitive yet successful gun factories in the third world.
Yes, and they only exist because the government turns a completely blind eye. If you had a choice between all guns coming from America and all guns being made in Mexico, the government can do something about the latter but absolutely nothing about the former.
I was there a while ago - it's a fun place and for a few dollars you can take an AK out behind the shack and let rip. Usually the tourists use Russian ones and they are less likely to explode on you than the local copies.
I saw him thread a muzzle and priming rounds. It looks very much like they are getting 99% done guns and just assembling them, or making stocks or converting them to select fire, which happens in Mexico already. That's just a technical redefinition of what a "gun" is. However even if Mexico was forced to make do entirely with 90% lowers, it would still be a massive restriction in volume. The number of lowers is way, way smaller than the number of guns that are made every day.
> “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
That was straight out of Nixon's aide's mouth. Openly admitting that the white conservative establishment sought ways to oppress and commit genocide on "racially inferior" demographic.
It's now Mexicans and Muslims turn. They are the new "Japs". It seems like hatred and segregation is constant driving force at unifying this country.
I've heard that quote before, but I don't really know its pedigree. Do you have a reference? (I also imagine the lack of sourcing is why you got downvoted).
The Nixon aide who allegedly said that quote died before it was published, so there is some reason to be uncertain about its veracity. It wasn't published until long, long after it was apparently said.
I find it completely plausible and it's very much in line with my political leanings to believe it, but still.
Thanks, I have certainly seen that quote before and thought it actually had been thoroughly vetted. I was not aware that the man quoted was dead.
I've been making a point in recent months to make particular note of things that confirm my own biases, as the last six months have suggested that everything I know is wrong, at least as far as people are concerned...
If anyone doubts the contents of the quoted text, they can copy paste it into Google and discover numerous websites pointing at it. That will guide you to the right source.
Possibly someone downvoted it because they fall under the same establishment or an offspring of that 'Murica generation.
edit: I don't understand the downvotes. This comment contains instructions on how to find the desired source of my original comment which was actually published and publicized in printed media. If you have trouble with Googling, I suggest restarting your computer. Otherwise, trying to deny the track record of systematic racial oppression evident long after the end of racial segregation through downvoting, you are going against history of USA.
> This comment contains instructions on how to find the desired source of my original comment which was actually published and publicized in printed media.
Then why is it so hard to include it yourself? It's poor form to make statements from sources and omit those sources. Unless you typed that from memory, you had one of those sources handy when you made the comment, so you could have included it easily, rather than make every person that read it have to determine whether they believed it as even worth researching to see if it is real or something you made up.
> I don't understand the downvotes.
> Possibly someone downvoted it because they fall under the same establishment or an offspring of that 'Murica generation.
> If you have trouble with Googling, I suggest restarting your computer.
People aren't denying anything. Perhaps your attitude is the cause of the downvotes. Regardless of why you were originally downvoted, imagining it might be because they aren't acting in good faith or are incapable of assessing your comment on its merit isn't exactly a useful way to move forward.
I've always been kind of curious how the people who fill threads with quotes work. Do they have macro hot keys? A spreadsheet of quotes? (In some cases, the first google result for a quote is a page explaining that the quote is fake, so either they have some system that avoids google or they just ignore results they don't like.)
I've always wondered that as well, not being one that remembers quotable material in enough detail to be able to put it into use easily in most cases.
For myself, usually I remember someone said something in a vague way that I think it relevant (often a prior HN submission of some sort), and I start using google and hn.algolia.com to start looking stuff up until I find the article. comment or submission I thought I remembered or I give up. My quotes are generally less quotes and more notes about what I think are interesting references to the discussion at hand. I imagine if even only one out of fifty people reading do that for the whole submission, it still might add up rather quickly.
Of the things I do reference, I generally find I'm likely to use them multiple times over a few months. As things are in recent memory, I see more connections. Sort of like after you learn a new concept you see places to use it all over. It feels like it's just topical all of a sudden, but I suspect it's mostly just that prior to learning it those times weren't strong enough to leave an impression in memory, making it feel like you didn't hear about it before when actually you did.
It then fetches the Hacker News URL, analyzes the text and finds a relevant quote that contrasts the average sentiment of the comments and then posts it.
I think it's more of a birthday paradox type of deal...you get enough people in a thread, it becomes increasingly likely that at least one knows of a long-ass quote that is relevant to the situation.
The birthday paradox might not be a good technical analogy: the number of ways to collide grows quadratically, while the number of people who can individually think of quotes grows linearly.
If someone is so concerned about sources, they can include it in the reply after the parent.
Nobody likes people who complain but won't do anything about it.
If the lack of citation bothers you so much, maybe you should include it yourself. Nobody else gives a shit in case you haven't noticed.
The original comment had no citation yet it received upvotes, contrary to your view of HN. Everyone is intimate with Google and they can follow the instructions in this thread to find the appropriate sources. If you want citation in the format you find in academic papers, that is on you, not the original commentator.
I can't help you any further but there are plenty of comments being posted as we speak that lack citations, you better get on that quick!
No, it's a forum where the norm is that if you are going to make factual assertions where you aren't the source, you should include the source.
> If someone is so concerned about sources, they can include it in the reply after the parent.
Which is just making everyone else do your work for you. It's fine, if you want to make assertions and not include sources, you'll either be ignored by some number of people, or depending on how different the assertion is to their worldview, possibly downvoted.
If you're interested in having a discussion, sources help. If you're just interested in putting your mark down and saying something because you have the urge, then they don't really matter.
There is no norm or enforcement for citations. That is your personal preference. I don't want to spend time chasing down and writing citations. Fact checking is really up to the reader. There is no rule written that says all comments must have proper citations following APA formatting.
Obviously there is a community norm. We both just experienced it. You were downvoted (although that could have been for presentation), and I was upvoted for noting that the reason you were downvoted could have been for not supplying sources. For better or worse, that's how it is here at this point in time.
> That is your personal preference.
It is my preference. I'll note that it's not my preference to the point that I'll generally downvote for it though, and I didn't in this case. Other people do though, and there seems to be a general support for requesting that people supply evidence for claims. That's what makes it a community norm.
> I don't want to spend time chasing down and writing citations.
And I don't want to either. And other readers don't want to either. As a trade-off between one person, who presumably already knows that the reference exists and has some idea where to find it and every other person who reads it, it's obvious that the efficient answer is for the person who is using it as evidence to also include a link to the source when they use it.
> There is no rule written that says all comments must have proper citations following APA formatting.
The norm that the person making claim bears the burden of persuasion in supporting that claim with appropriate evidence and/or reasoning (citations being a means of referencing pre-existing examples of the former) existed for centuries before Wikipedia.
It has always blown my mind that anyone at all was surprised that when governments declared war on dealers that they responded by acting like soldiers.
If you are interested in helping out in ending the drug prohibition in the United States I recommend donating or getting involved with the Drug Policy Alliance: http://www.drugpolicy.org/
Has there been any discussion of the Portuguese model? Their decriminalization experiment has been running for more than a decade, and the results seem to be pretty stellar. I hope we can eventually get something similar going stateside.
What happened to Mexico seems quite clear. Back in the 80s-90s, South American cocaine and marijuana were mainly smuggled via Central America and the Caribbean. Some Mexican marijuana and heroin was smuggled to the US, but quality was low, and there wasn't much money in it.
But then the US clamped down on the Caribbean route. And now cocaine was moving through Mexico. Now most illegal marijuana comes from Canada. So Mexican gangs are mainly moving cocaine (and heroin).
So yes, it's the US drug problem, and the War on Drugs, that's fucked over Mexico.
No it isn't. It's a huge nightmare and this is why even current and former Mexican Presidents are calling for legalization - despite pressure from the U.S. against it.
Well, then they essentially become above board legitimate businesses competing on their ability to provide a service in the market.
Legalization implies regulation of some sort (e.g. like alcohol). You could also have a government-run monopoly.
The point is to remove the billions of dollars in black-market profits which give rise to criminal organizations who cannot depend on the law to resolve their disputes and must therefore "make their own law".
They'd be competing with alcohol and pharmaceutical companies, who could easily arrange supply and wholesale distribution, and have the advantage navigating political and regulatory issues in a legal way. The paramilitary aspect of cartels would become obsolete, or perhaps be focused elsewhere? Like many people in the black market for cannabis in the US, ranging from growers to judges, they probably see legalization as a disruption that is not welcome since the current system is working well for them.
I lived there some 20 years ago and it really seemed like a golden time. The conflict in Chiapas was more or less over, and as a foreigner I felt comfortable traveling anywhere in the country with only a US driver's license and a birth certificate. Times have certainly changed, and I can't imagine how it is for Mexicans nowadays living with the cartels.
> the architecture (particularly D.F.) makes for a crazy, exciting mix
D.F. is an alias for Mexico City. From Wikipedia:
On January 29, 2016, [Mexico City] ceased to be called the Federal District (Spanish: Distrito Federal or D.F.) and is now in transition to become the country's 32nd federal entity, giving it a level of autonomy comparable to that of a state.
> makes for a crazy, exciting mix where the wealth and treasure of history and (deserved) national pride contrasts with poverty and the political and social conservatism that goes alongside.
I am curious why you grouped political and social conservatism with poverty.
Here's an example: during the 2012 election, a national supermarket chain gave a small amount of credit by way of a gift card to anyone who promised to vote for the (now current) party. Poverty means votes can be bought, allowing politics to focus on maintaining (corporate) status quo instead of providing a good life for citizens.
It also means a lower rate of literacy which correlates the world over with social and religious conservatism. Quoting Harvard: ".. economic downturns have contributed to periods of increased social conservatism that have brought right-wing political parties to prominence"
