We have similar problems in the UK. Lots of extra paperwork for small businesses and individuals, very little impact on big crime that was supposed to be the target. Just opening a bank account can be a pain, and more so if you are living abroad (whether a citizen or not).
It's pretty much everywhere after the US forced any banks with any business dealings in the US, which in practice is all of them because of how international banking networks operate, to sign up to all this crap as well. So you've got organisations like Amazon, a USD800 billion company, happily laundering their (absence of) tax payments overseas with no repercussions while Granny Smith has to fill out AML paperwork when she sells her crocheted tea cosies through an online shopping site.
One might as well say "the surgeon tried to cut out the cancer; took out some healthy tissue". Yeah, that's how it goes. The existence of side effects is not convincing as a reason not to do things. The objective is to get results while minimizing undesirable side effects, but the desirable amount of side effects is not zero.
> a violation of the fourth amendment that protects the rights of people against unreasonable searches and seizures
So there exist juridical interpretations that call monitoring low value money transfer «unreasonable searches and seizures»? This is immensely interesting. Does anyone have further info?
> With the changes, people became reluctant to make these transactions, Ornelas said, because they worry it will open them up for government surveillance or targeting by immigration authorities in the current intensified enforcement.
Presumably, because it's hard to get a bank account in a country you aren't supposed to be in.
Unbanked folks are a large, legal population in the country. And immigration authorities recently have been less concerned about status vs if you look like you belong.
You can't practically use foreign institutions for your day-to-day banking.
Someone writes you a check. Can you easily cash that with your bank in another country? Best scenario: they have a check cashing app for your phone, so you don't have to mail anything off or present in person; but will that take an American check?
Economists keep track of the number of "unbanked" people. At the lower end of the spectrum the % of "unbanked" individuals is quite high and they live almost exclusively in an all-cash economy. Particularly in immigrant communities. There are a number of problems with being "unbanked", in particular if your house is burglarized you can lose your entire life savings, and you have little to no access to formal credit, which in the US at least, is the primary path to accruing wealth or at least savings.
They systemically lock people out of banking, home ownership, employment, running a business, selling their products, getting famous, and so-on.
There's a class of people that has to have "more" than the rest. And they do that by controlling access to everything. They spend tons of money on distractions and concepts like moneylending which makes everyone have to go through the "loan" and "approval" process - of course only some people get approved lol So nobody else gets a house!
Instead of trying to become better themselves and make new discoveries, and build genuine wealth they can give back, the gatekeeping/inheritance mindset is to stop others who are trying to better themselves. To knock them back. It doesn't stop at preventing others from attaining wealth and status, they don't even want you to have a roof over your head.
If they had it their way, you wouldn't have a bank, house, car, and barely any money. You'd be wearing some goofy uniform working for them living in poverty.
Depends. Why can't banks offer more debit cards to more people and, I don't know, stop honoring overdrafts? Transactions should decline, not overdraft, even with overdraft off.
We've built lots of traps for people that have balances near-zero that keep them near zero, and one little mistake snowballs into blacklists from Telecheck, ChexSystems, and other fun companies.
Meanwhile once you can keep your balance with at least three significant zeros in it, the bank will be happy to shower you back in rewards and cashback, ripped away from the fees and interest levied to the poor.
Bank of America had a class action against them because they would reorder transactions to make you overdraft.
For example, when I was relatively poor and near 0 balance in like 2009 era I’d wait for my direct deposit to come so I could grocery shop and pay bills.
When it deposited, the funds would become available to use even though the transaction wasn’t cleared, pretty normal so far.
So say you pay 2 bills and grocery shop, come back on Monday and you’d see that your pending deposit vanished, 3 transactions cleared for 3 overdrafts, then your deposit cleared afterward.
This is just one that I know about because it happened to me. I wonder how many less blatant scams like this exist that most people aren’t even aware of.
TD Bank was slapped for the exact same process. Transactions would be reordered to ensure you incurred hundreds in overdraft fees even though you had just deposited a check.
It's a bit of reverse check kiting: The bank changing when your check clears so that you actually don't have the money you think you do.
Now, there were fine print that stated only X dollars worth of your deposit would be "Available immediately", but even that was a lie.
This is 100% true and also a tactic used by PNC when I was a near zero person. The hack around it was to try to withdraw cash, then use that. They wouldn't let you overdraft cash withdrawal. That's one anecdotal likely stale trick to avoid the traps they set.
When we had to juggle overdraft fees, our trick was to get a large money order. We would take one big overdraft with one fee and save ourselves from multiple fees while still paying multiple bills.
Interesting, PNC has never once done anything like this to me. In fact I feel that they are pretty up front about telling you what you have available and what your actual balance is.
It’s generally not something you’d notice if you’re not living on the edge of $0 balance. I’d be surprised if any banks are still doing it after the bofa settlement.
The problem is then you have the card number sitting in some online card wallet, set for Autopay or something, and suddenly it's just... allowed to charge you next month even though the card's got nothing.
Hell no, that shit should have bounced. Now you're in the hole $80 because your phone payment took an autopay from your Visa number.
Blindly allowing recurring auths to bypass the overdraft rules is utterly insane. Whoops, let's just autobill a few extra zeros!
Yes. It's a little sad to see other comments assume that people have something to hide for doing something as basic as wanting to send money back to family.
Banking services with hidden fees can be inherently less predictable than working with cash and fee-based financial services for folks who have low income or irregular pay.
This is my first exposure to this saying. I immediately thought of Jim Crow laws and thought it a useful way to look at systems. What is a better term for these wolf in sheep's clothing systems? I think the framing of achieved results being the purpose of the system is missing "something." The goals being different than stated feels paramount, and those goals succeeding is the system doing what it was designed to do with a wink
I'm sure POSIWID gets used as a reductive way to avoid thinking through things, but his examples seem just as devoid of thought. His 67% cancer center could probably cure more cancers if society invested more in cancer treatments and research, or if doctors persisted in continuing treatment instead of palliative care more often. Russia could nuke Kiev, or Ukraine's Western allies could send their own troops to push Russia back. The New York bus system could convert to all electric vehicles but that would cost a lot and have its own environmental considerations.
In the current conversation, the policy could have been based on research about where and how cartels were doing their laundering, and designed in a way that minimized the impact on non-cartel immigrant communities.
In all of those cases, the system is the result of choices that lead to the current outcomes, and I think that's the part that's worth thinking about.
>but his examples seem just as devoid of thought. His 67% cancer center could probably cure more cancers if society invested more in cancer treatments and research, or if doctors persisted in continuing treatment instead of palliative care more often. Russia could nuke Kiev, or Ukraine's Western allies could send their own troops to push Russia back. The New York bus system could convert to all electric vehicles but that would cost a lot and have its own environmental considerations.
Right, but the original claim wasn't "the purpose of a system is what it can accomplish subject to the political and economic constraints placed on it", it's just "the purpose of the system is what it does".
"The purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure as many patients as possible" seems also like an extreme? They are businesses, after all, and there will be cases that would be unreasonable to pursue?
Damn, what a waste of words. Does nothing but give brain dead examples while ignoring that the phrase is critical of systemic societal issues.
Law and order is the stated intention. The cops not solving crimes for the poor and them beating the poor is the system's purpose.
Instead of noticing that violence isn't applied equally, or that unequal resources are spent enforcing justice for the rich versus the poor, he compares it to carbon emissions from busses. Wow, how insightful.
Don't you know? Our great leaders are playing 4d chess on a higher dimension and everything they do is carefully planned and executed. Every failure and blunder is a move beyond our comprehension as part of the supreme master plan. Haven't you read The Art of War???
Obviously sarcasm... But in all seriousness, it's scary how many people genuinely believe this.
"Our great leaders are playing 4d civilization in multiple dimensions beyond 4. Most of what they do is carefully planned and executed but there are many unknowns and there are also "unknown unknowns". There are players not sitting at the table who are pulling levers elsewhere. There are unknown players. Most moves' results are beyond our comprehension due to purely complexity and the "fog of war", not necessarily b/c of any (of many different) superficially clever 'supreme master plans'."
It surprises me how much Americans don't understand how deeply the cartel is in every transaction. Yes, sending money to Grandma to pay for a car is funding the cartel who probably got paid to make the car available. Grandma may even pay small direct bribes to the cartel just to be able to live her life.
Either all of Mexico can move to the US (probably not a winning solution) or we can make Mexico a safe and excellent country again, and that means getting rid of the cartel.
And yes, other countries have their issues too and we should help stabilize those countries as well.
If the Mexican government can fix their cartel issue, we can go back to normal remittances. Until then the US will make policy choices to resolve problems.
As always, the salt of the earth people will pay the cost for politicians being bad at things.
What you're suggesting is that all Mexicans suffer more because some money may somehow end up in the hands of the cartel. And that, for some reason, the US should help do this. That's absurd.
If you really want to eliminate the cartels make recreational drugs legal.
Positive effects aside, legalizing recreational drugs will not eliminate the cartels, but instead will reroute the distribution of their product through "legal" channels. The cartels have sufficient power that the only move left is their integration with established markets. They aren't just going to lie flat while "legitimate" corporations take their spot.
Legalizing has other benefits though, like increasing scrutiny into human- and arms-trafficking, a legitimized drug business will need to shed that part somehow and hide it.
Plus we have seen from italian-american gangs and certain casinos that if you force them to legitimate businesses, they eventually become legal organizations. Why continue with illegal and volatile illegal business when you have a profitable legal one?
> If you really want to eliminate the cartels make recreational drugs legal.
Insufficient. Avocados are already legal in the US and yet the cartels have moved into that business. Cartels follow money. They are not going to just roll over when drug money dries up.
You give your sister $100. You find out later that she uses $50 of that money to buy heroin and inject it in herself.
Do you keep giving her the $100?
Absolutely not! This isn't even a real question.
If you directly enable a person or group of people or country to harm themselves and others, you have a duty to stop doing it.
If US remittances are directly fueling the cartel which beats, rapes, murders and even engages in torture, then not only may the US cease that but it is plainly ethically bound to do so.
Yes, this will make it hard for Grandma to buy a car.
You can't fund the people who torture and rape random Mexican farmers so Grandma can buy a car.
> If you really want to eliminate the cartels make recreational drugs legal.
While murdering drug users with their own money may seem like a clever solution, you are in fact still doing murder just in long form.
> You can't fund the people who torture and rape random Mexican farmers so Grandma can buy a car.
If you have paid taxes, or participated in the United States of Americas economy, you have directly funded the rape of indigenous Americans, the bombing of Venezuelan fisherman and Iranian schoolgirls.
How do you think the rest of the world should react to this? Total economic embargo towards the US? Leveling the continent?
How should Americans who oppose rape and murder of children (like you seem to be) react to the fact that they fund rapes and murders?
You pay taxes in the US? You are directly enabling a country to harm others.
You ever buy a phone? You are directly enabling a chain of groups to harm people (in the name of creating that phone).
You ever give a dollar to a homeless man? You might be directly contributing to them harming themselves (or possibly just letting them buy food/drink).
Heck even your example about your sister, I think some people would argue that it's still the moral choice.
Clearly there's a spectrum here. Black and white thinking and statements aren't helping and shouldn't be the basis for policy decisions.
You can and should be making explicit choices in that framework.
You should not buy phones connected to the mistreatment of the Uighur population - and that is doable.
If you think the US is doing more harm than good, you are allowed to move and surrender your citizenship.
And yes, that is literally why I don't support direct cash handouts to the homeless. You can feed them and house them, you can't throw money at them and expect a good outcome.
You should not cast your money as to do harm. If your money is the difference between your sister being homeless or not, then stop giving her money and pay her rent. Buy her grocery cards.
But if you directly contribute to harm, knowably, you are enabling that harm. This is not some weird novel part of ethics. It is in fact black and white.
> If you think the US is doing more harm than good, you are allowed to move and surrender your citizenship.
Well, no, you aren't necessarily without paying a special additional tax to the US government, so it doesn't really solve the problem of believing that paying US taxes is active participation in morally intolerable actions.
> If you think the US is doing more harm than good, you are allowed to move and surrender your citizenship.
Actually, I have heard that it’s very hard, if possible at all, to surrender American citizenship. It’s a real problem for some people who had the misfortune of being born on American soil.
> And yes, that is literally why I don't support direct cash handouts to the homeless. You can feed them and house them, you can't throw money at them and expect a good outcome.
You maintain this despite all the research showing that this is the most effective way to help people?
I am against marijuana but I think it's clear legalizing it successfully starves the cartel of a lot of drug financing (and therefore we should both legalize it and have public campaigns against using it, ala alcohol).
Even the weird state based legalization has caused the cartels to pivot into things like avocado farming and mining.
Drug users don't seem to be overly preoccupied with what drug they use. Probably shifting them towards lower risk choices (pot, ketamine) and aggressively crack down on dealers is a winning combo.
(A lot of low level dealers are just graduated drug users but the line between buying and selling is a large one and dealers do immense harm while also shielding more dangerous criminals. Incentives against dealing incl aggressive enforcement are powerful at dissuading low level dealers, which in turn starves the criminal organizations.)
> Drug users don't seem to be overly preoccupied with what drug they use.
What? In the case of opiates (which is the most significant drug problem we have at the moment), users are often physically addicted to a specific substance and that addiction was often initiated by legitimate medical usage of that substance. They'll certainly care if you say "hey, you can't use heroin any more, have some weed instead".
The medical pipeline for opiate addiction has been gone for several years now.
Most users were exposed to fentanyl unknowingly through buying other tainted drugs, often expecting percocet or even ecstasy.
Some of these users do require methodone treatment, but you can't give drug users unregulated access to opiates. That is just not gonna work out. Either they are going to self taper ("stretching" their tail of their stash) or they are going to end up in a hospital and get tapered by a professional.
Fron what I can tell, immigration levels right now are about the same as they were in the late 19th century, when a lot of our great grandparents first came to the US.
At that time, the scare was about the Chinese, as opposed to brown people from South of the border.
> Fron what I can tell, immigration levels right now are about the same as they were in the late 19th century, when a lot of our great grandparents first came to the US.
... and which, in turn, led to the Immigration Act of 1924, which gave the US 40 years of relief from the influx to integrate the existing population. We need another such.
Where do you get the line about the biggest migration in history from? Your link seems to just be to a one sentence Reddit comment from someone with the same username as you, and no source.
Feel free to come up with another country that has sent 10% of its population over 50 years to one other country, and is large enough that that means an eight-figure population transfer.
This article is repeating a transparently false framing as the truth. This wasn't a law about cartel money laundering, which doesn't happen near the border anyway. Money laundering at scale happens in the global market and always has.
The clear purpose of the regulation was exactly the "side effect" detailed in the article: hurting immigrant communities that maintain ties across the border. And it worked. It does no one any good to pretend otherwise.
The issue is that it wasn't "clear" to sufficient people. Too many people believe at face value the claims. Some of them honestly believe the face value claims.
I'm not sure that more information will help those people. I saw an interview with a Haitian-American restaurant chain owner who voted for Trump and was dismayed that he might have to close a couple of locations due the removal of Temporary Protective Status for Haiti causing him to lose employees. He said that Trump sold him on the idea that "he was a businessman, and would act like a businessman", and that he now regrets his vote.
Like, the "eating the cats and dogs" line, specifically targeted at Haitians, wasn't enough for you to think that maybe this guy didn't have your best interest at heart? Also Trump's history as a "businessman" is anything but wildly successful or something to envy.
These people will see whatever they want to see until they get hit, so unless you're in a position to provide the hit, or somehow impart discernment that most elementary school kids have, they can only be contained and we should be happy if they pay their taxes and don't vote.
> Also Trump's history as a "businessman" is anything but wildly successful or something to envy.
Maybe we should stop treating these contradictions with Polyanna level of naivety. What is more likely: a.) these people did not seen the obvious contradictions or b.) these people are giving out publicly palatable sympathetic responses. It is all economic vote, except that conservatives were never good for small businesses.
What if these people are not as dumb as they pretend to be. What if they are actually attracted to the same thing that makes other men attracted to Trump - the male supremacy ideology and the racism against "not them exactly". The fun ugly part of it. The cruelty against homosexuals and trans. Saying that openly will still makes you look bad, so we get the "we had no idea, this was just economic vote" kind of nonsense.
One can be both malicious and naive. Regardless, more information isn't going to solve the issue. The information was presented; they ignored it for whatever reason.
Getting them to stop ignoring information they don't like is the problem.
We have plenty of those, we are just ignoring them.
> "What if they were all perverts". Well, that would have been remarkable in the distribution of chances.
There would be absolutely nothing remarkable about distribution of chances here. It is the most plausible and explanation. It is also completely consistent with all the data we have - including the fact that record of abuse never harms republican politicians. Instead, it raises their credit. It is also consistent with philosophies the leadership openly pushes for.
Its a particularly galling policy for disproportionately hurting small businesses given the number of money laundering, sanctions avoidance, etc big fish Trump has pardoned, ended investigations and enforcement generally.
The belief that all the people you yourselves elected are lying all the time and openly out to get you is such an uniquely Gringo idea it's entirely possible the migrants in this community, like the one showcased in the article, mistakenly took the racists' word at face value.
Retrospectively, looking at the various kinds of concentration camps set up all over the country, that might have been a bad choice to make. But that doesn't make it a less reasonable one at the time.
Money laundering is an absurd concept. People should be free to transfer money to whoever they like, without permission. It is a fundamental purpose of money. To deny this purpose puts the validity of particular money into question. Putting up fences results in a very high rate of false positives. No wonder people use crypto as they should.
If you want to go after cartels, then actually go after cartels. That's not what they're doing.
> Money laundering is an absurd concept. People should be free to transfer money to whoever they like, without permission.
They got Al Capone for tax evasion, not any of the other obviously illegal stuff he was doing. I don't know the details, but I imagine it was because he put in effort to create an organization that made it difficult-to-impossible for the law-abiding feds to go after him directly. That's why it's important to also prohibit the ancillary activities of crime.
And money laundering isn't an absurd concept, it just means it's additionally illegal to conceal the origin of illicit income.
If you want to get all dogmatic against stuff like laws against money laundering, come up with an effective alternative. Otherwise those laws aren't going anywhere and few will care about your objections, because they're unreasonable.
> If you want to get all dogmatic against stuff like laws against money laundering, come up with an effective alternative
No, it's not just a matter of alternatives: it is also a matter of principles.
For example: in europe, I am unable to make online purchases with electronic money, as all the payment devices are tracked, matched with a personal identity - they cannot be unidentified as they could be only a few years ago. There existed occasional cards for online shopping - now they ask you a local telephone number, identity tied. This under the excuse of "countering money laundering". So there you have "privacy" vs "financial monitoring" - with immensely disproportionate effects in a farcical manouvre.
Obvious solution is to make soft drugs like fentanyl fully legal. Just apply sufficient purity to standards as regulation like with any other drug. Issue solved instantly. It is not like other deathly drugs aren't already legal.
Obvious solution is to make soft drugs like fentanyl fully legal. Just apply sufficient purity to standards as regulation like with any other drug. Issue solved instantly. It is not like other deathly drugs aren't already legal. [emphasis mine]
Just pointing out the double standards and the main funding source being due to illegality. And we all known how many people die due to ethanol each year. But because it is drug of the choice by too many totalitarian fascists it won't get banned like other drugs do.
> Just pointing out the double standards and the main funding source being due to illegality. And we all known how many people die due to ethanol each year. But because it is drug of the choice by too many totalitarian fascists it won't get banned like other drugs do.
Alcohol is a drug with a huge amount of cultural significance going back millennia. Don't be a robot: it's in a different category and not a double standard.
Buy yeah, one easy solution to crime problems is just to make everything legal. Sure, it totally misses the point, but it seems very clever to the software engineer mind.
So it clearly is double-standard. Excusing it with "cultural significance" is clear example of something being double standard. And it is one of the worst reasons to have. Genital mutilation of children of both genders is also of "cultural significance" so I take those supporting allowing it are also reasonable? Or is that a different category because it is not your culture?
If keeping it illegal is not working clearly best move forward might be to look at making it legal thus solving the issue. And that does not miss a point. Lot of stuff previously illegal has been made legal. So why not drugs like fentanyl?
> So it clearly is double-standard. Excusing it with "cultural significance" is clear example of something being double standard. And it is one of the worst reasons to have. Genital mutilation of children of both genders is also of "cultural significance" so I take those supporting allowing it are also reasonable? Or is that a different category because it is not your culture?
No. Frankly, it just means you're being zealous and small-minded: hyper-focusing on little bits (and feeling very self-righteous as a result) without looking at the whole picture. Demanding the world conform to whatever limited understanding you have of it. I see it all the time.
Alcohol is its own category, whether you chose to recognize it or not. That's the truth, so quit whining about it.
> If keeping it illegal is not working clearly best move forward might be to look at making it legal thus solving the issue. And that does not miss a point. Lot of stuff previously illegal has been made legal. So why not drugs like fentanyl?
Because it opiates being legal and freely available was not working? Ignoring your myopia for a minute, what you're really advocating for is a dumb oscillation between the problems of legalized opiates and illegal opiates, because you're letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
I don't think you are ready for constructive non-zealous open-minded discussion which objectively looks at whole thing without any previous biases or and wider understanding. So it is pointless to continue this discussion as you are not ready to take it honestly.
> I don't think you are ready for constructive non-zealous open-minded discussion which objectively looks at whole thing without any previous biases or and wider understanding. So it is pointless to continue this discussion as you are not ready to take it honestly.
Heh. I mean, you're the one who's been refusing to look outside your narrow focus to "look at the whole thing" and rejecting "wider understandings" (e.g. the actual cultural significance of alcohol, the well-understood negative effects of freely available opioids), but whatever. You be you, and twist things however you need to save face.
Fentanyl is not a soft drug, but opium, heroin and morphine can be so if administered correctly, and meet the same needs satisfactorily. Fentanyl is extremely deadly if misdosed.
I already did, and noted it in my parent comment if you actually read it. The alternative is crypto. It works. To use your own words back at you, no one who needs to transmit money freely will care about your silly objections, because they're unreasonable.
If money laundering is not absurd, then electricity laundering for the purpose of a crime must similarly not be absurd. Everyone must be required to provide documentation of their electricity usage and spikes. After all it could be used to conduct a crime, and we can lower crime by having laws against electricity laundering. /s
In truth, many little brains that I am interacting with here seem to be having trouble with letting abstractions be abstractions. A society can be at rest only when it doesn't have to think twice about its abstractions, otherwise it will never know peace. The same people also can't rewind to see how foolish the war on drugs is in the first place.
> I already did, and noted it in my parent comment if you actually read it. The alternative is crypto.
No you didn't, you totally misunderstood what I meant. I was not talking about an alternative payment system that "bypasses" anti-money laundering regulations, but alternative regulations.
> It works. To use your own words back at you, no one who needs to transmit money freely will care about your silly objections, because they're unreasonable.
It doesn't "work." Not wanting to facilitate the transfer of money derived from crime is not a "silly objection."
Also you seem to be confused about the difference between the crime of money laundering and anti-money laundering regulations.
You're seeing it exclusively from the perspective of an oppressive government, not the people. You do not serve the people, only the oligarchs. It is why your argument has no merit to the people who seek freedom. This is not a forum for government propaganda.
If the underlying action is illegal, then go after the underlying action, LOL. How many millions of innocents have to suffer for one crook to be caught?
To use your own words back at you, generally speaking, it makes sense that a society wants to make the lives of its citizens easier, not more convoluted.
The truth about money laundering is a label used by the government to repress innocent individuals by burdening them under regulations.
> If the underlying action is illegal, then go after the underlying action,
Sure, but the best way to know there is illegal action is to flag money that comes out of nowhere.
> How many millions of innocents have to suffer for one crook to be caught?
You seem to be under the wrong expression that the article is about money laundering, but it is not, that's just the legal framework used to achieve the goal. If it weren't for money laundering, they works have chosen something else to achieve their goals.
> Money laundering is an absurd concept. People should be free to transfer money to whoever they like, without permission.
This ignores that taxes are a thing that need enforcement. Its like saying basic necessities should be free, the world should be without pollution, or cancer shouldn't exist.
Well of course they should be. You have been brainwashed so much that you can't even conceive of a different world.
For taxes, I favor land value tax. Basic necessities can absolutely be free under it, as the super rich hold plenty of land. We can have a world without much pollution if we switch away from fossil fuels, and if we take the lifecycle of chemicals into account. Note that excesss carbon dioxide is pollution too. Regarding cancer, medical science is working toward it.
> Well of course they should be. You have been brainwashed so much that you can't even conceive of a different world.
Assuming you are talking about free basic necessities: I can conceive it fine, I just also understand that conceiving doesn't mean it will work, and history has shown it won't. Me making the statement was itself conception no?
I can conceive of a million different economic systems, but I also understand most of them are infeasible, and the risk of running the experiment is extremely high, with little to gain in a my country, where obesity is a much larger problem than starving.
Everything I noted is entirely feasible. It is not pie in the sky. In fact, history has shown that it works. The risk is more pronounced with inaction than with action. If you have a decent imagination and a fuller appreciation for history, you would see it.
Define "pie in the sky", because you have described the utopia that every eco-socialist has been chasing for 100 years...
The problem that makes it infeasible isn't the math, or the technology, it's people. Communism would work beautifully... if everyone in the world was different.
Huh. I did not ask for communism, nor do I believe in it. I do believe that people need to be rewarded for their effort. Democratic socialism and social democracy are sufficiently different from communism. When people's basic survival needs are met, which is the goal, they can be more free to pursue entrepreneurial and creative endeavors, otherwise they stay stuck in a minimum-wage job as under the current system. In the decades to come, minimum wage jobs need to be replaced by AI anyway, even physical robotic AI. It doesn't make sense to do by hand what can be automated.
A system where the population's wealth disparity keeps getting worse is nothing to be proud of. There have been systems of government in history where the system's total wealth made everyone more equal while preserving the reward for effort.
He's also making it difficult/impossible for people without work visas to obtain auto loans which is destroying the used car market in latino communities and cities with large latino populations. Executive Order 14406 defends this with,
> Low-dollar cross-border funds transfers have been used to facilitate or commit terrorist financing, narcotics trafficking, human trafficking, and other illegal activity.
They're banging the national security drum to make it unlivable here for some.
>He's also making it difficult/impossible for people without work visas to obtain auto loans [...]
>They're banging the national security drum to make it unlivable here for some.
But they're not supposed to be here in the first place? As for the people who are supposed to be here, but are collateral damage (ie. "which is destroying the used car market in latino communities") should we have sympathy for people in such situations? If a local casino is laundering money for drug cartels, but that casino funds the community because it employs workers, should we be against the FBI coming in and busting the casino? What if it's more benign than drug cartels, like run of the mill securities fraud?
But they're not supposed to be here in the first place?
Like any other system, the purpose is what the system actually does. Especially a system that's been around for decades.
We let them in, so they can work our fields and process our meat and whatever else. We shouldn't be surprised they want to buy cars, own business, and do other completely normal things.
>We let them in, so they can work our fields and process our meat and whatever else. We shouldn't be surprised they want to buy cars, own business, and do other completely normal things.
So if the city/state/federal government lets a drug addict/dealer population to exist for too long (despite their best efforts at cracking down), they'll eventually get grandfathered in, and we can't enforce anti-money laundering regulations or dismantle their crack dens?
The GOP has used immigration as a drum to beat since I became politically aware back in the Bill Clinton days. They've had numerous chances since then to fix immigration in one way or another, but they have not done so. They make a lot of noise. They build a few miles of fence. But, mostly they keep the system the same. Because they NEED that drum to beat.
Not remotely the same thing as Ukraine's army being stuck in a war they cannot win. Or whatever other not-quite-apt comparisons you want to make.
>Not remotely the same thing as Ukraine's army being stuck in a war they cannot win. Or whatever other not-quite-apt comparisons you want to make.
Did you get to comparison #3?
>The purpose of the British government is to propose a controversial new sentencing policy, stand firm in the face of protests for a while, then cave in after slightly larger protests and agree not to pass the policy after all.
>...
>The purpose of the British government is to govern Britain. But different British people disagree on how they should be governed, and sometimes one or another faction gets more power, so the government sometimes flip-flops about what it wants.
More to the point, the point isn't that POSWID is always false, it's that you can't use it as a thought terminating cliche in place of an actual argument.
"They might associate with the undocumented, therefore shouldn't be allowed to do normal things" was completely reductive.
Looking at El Paso, since it was the first city mentioned in the article, the entire city is about 25% immigrants (>200,000 people). And of that, more that 75% is here legally. So, 150,000 give or take, that according to your first comment, shouldn't be allowed to do business because there are illegals nearby?
I mean it makes sense. Let them come and work illegally, which is much cheaper and enables proper exploitation and then blame them for all kind of things and frame them as the bad guys that exploit the society.
I see lots of finger pointing at the workers without permits, but zero, and I mean really ZERO finger pointing at their employers. So basically it's totally fine and dandy to exploit poor people, but a crime to be poor people. All the rest is technicalities.
In Europe it's the other way around: the businesses employing folks with no right to work get fined to death, with no direct repercussions on the workers (except they lose that income, which is another discussion)
Oh, there is such a rich history of exploiting the underprivileged in the US. The more interesting bits lately center around a special visa for agricultural migrant workers, called the H2-A, which offers some basic worker protections (a minimum wage indexed to inflation, freedom to leave the farm, etc) so the employers can continue to pay low wages for long hours, keeping food prices low and profits high.
Except the farm businesses complained, and the Trump Department of Labor rolled back a bunch of the protections. For example, apparently a sticking point was the requirement that vehicles transporting visa holders have seatbelts for all occupants, so that was eliminated. Another was the requirement that workers be allowed to have guests visit them on employer-provided housing; an often-cited example is worship services provided by a priest. Also rolled back, too onerous.
This is all being stressed at historically high levels as immigration crackdowns continue. Essentially, food production in border states is increasingly forced to go through this visa program that has terrible oversight and protections that I consider below-par. It's not a sexy issue to yell about with a megaphone though.
If we want to stop illegal immigration, "not getting a car loan" and "harder to move money across the border" feel like the most humane ways to slow it down.
Plus, the drug trade coming in from Mexico is, in fact, a huge problem, not just for the US, but for Mexico itself. Mexico is run by cartels specifically because of how much money is made off selling drugs to Americans. This isn't some non-existent problem they are using as cover.
> If we want to stop illegal immigration, "not getting a car loan" and "harder to move money across the border" feel like the most humane ways to slow it down.
I can think of a more humane way: Prosecuting the employers who break the law by hiring undocumented workers. The prospect of employment is what draws migrants here in the first place.
It’s the only effective method and they basically refuse to do it. Which is a clear sign: the goal is not to “effectively and efficiently stop illegal immigration”. It’s to “cruelly and brutally punish illegal immigrants”. You will see some overlap between those two, but not much. Which is why our Stephen Miller executive policy is the way it is right now.
I think it's rather, keep those people around as useful scapegoats for empowering whatever next unpopular policy the oligarchy needs enacted to round up their next trillion.
Source? I've heard of companies hiring undocumented workers, but that's not the same as knowingly hiring them, or failing to do checks. For instance, the workers could have used stolen/forged SSNs.
At least in construction related industries, it's an open secret that tons of the workers are illegally working. Even if companies do the bare minimum required by law to check for work documents, they do it once and never think about it again. Smaller companies will sometimes just pay in cash off the books.
How is taking away their ability to earn money at all more humane than not giving them a car loan?
I'm genuinely confused how you are ranking those two things.
Nationalize businesses who get caught working with a permitless immigrant would be far, far more effective.
It ensure real checks, ensure that when the immigrant work permit expire, the employer have an incentive to help renew it (that alone ouwld probably solve 70 to 90% of illegal "aliens"
People with tourist visas I expect fully entitled and able to get car loans... (Edit: maybe I am misunderstanding the whole thing: is it "loaning cars" or is it "loaning the money to buy cars"?)
Anecdotally speaking, I've personally lived in multiple countries on multi-year-long temporary resident visas without the right to work, because getting the right to work is a separate process from being allowed to be somewhere. So have family members. And in case it makes a difference, which it might, one of those countries was the US.
In fact, did you know, in Canada it doesn't count as work for visa purposes if you work over the internet for a foreign company and get paid into a foreign bank account and don't compete professionally with local interests? (This is a free hot tip for anyone wanting to live in Canada. It might be true in some other places too, but I don't know.)
>Anecdotally speaking, I've personally lived in multiple countries on multi-year-long temporary resident visas without the right to work, because getting the right to work is a separate process from being allowed to be somewhere. So have family members. And in case it makes a difference, which it might, one of those countries was the US.
Usually those long term visas (eg. student visas, I guess) require some sort of extra vetting to acquire (ie. they're not the tourist visas that get auto-issued at the border), and therefore are unlikely to be possessed by "people who aren't supposed to be here", so as a practical matter I agree they should be accepted in place of a "work visa".
> in Canada it doesn't count as work for visa purposes if you work over the internet for a foreign company and get paid into a foreign bank account and don't compete professionally with local interests?
Source? If you can do that, a Canadian could too. So you're directly competing with "local interests".
What kind of activities are not considered to be “work”?
...
long distance (by telephone or Internet) work done by a temporary resident whose employer is outside Canada and who is remunerated from outside Canada;
187 (1) For the purposes of paragraph 186(a), a business visitor to Canada is a foreign national who ... seeks to engage in international business activities in Canada without directly entering the Canadian labour market.
...
(3) For the purpose of subsection (1), a foreign national seeks to engage in international business activities in Canada without directly entering the Canadian labour market only if
(a) the primary source of remuneration for the business activities is outside Canada; and
(b) the principal place of business and actual place of accrual of profits remain predominately outside Canada.
> If you can do that, a Canadian could too. So you're directly competing with "local interests".
You may send your letter of complaint to the Government of Canada's department of Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship.
I'm kidding. :) I guess the interests to which you're referring are just tautologically not the interests I meant. Apologies for the confusion.
So why would anyone give a loan to someone who can't legally work? If it's really spouse that's the sole earner, why not have the spouse take out the loan?
>1) People get loans against assets literally all the time.
Typically in these cases, there's actually a source of income. You have to pay back the loan, after all. Otherwise I struggle to imagine why anyone without income but with plenty of assets would take out a loan, and having such documentation requirements would greatly inconvenience them. All this feels like a fig leaf for allowing workers lacking work visas to live and work in the US, while turning a blind eye.
>2) People can live and work in different places.
Again, is this something that actually happens, or is it just a contrived scenario? Is there really a large contingent of people working Mexico and then commuting back and forth to the US? They can't get a loan in Mexico?
> "Typically in these cases, there's actually a source of income."
You mean that there's a demonstrated ability to repay the loan, which isn't the same thing. I say this as a person who has taken many loans in my life, including ones while not working. Anyway that's up to the lender to sort out isn't it?
> "Otherwise I struggle to imagine why anyone without income but with plenty of assets would take out a loan"
Just because you struggle to imagine doesn't mean it isn't common for reasons you don't know or think about. I think this just shows some missing awareness about how things really work in the world more than anything else. Even Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, has billions of dollars in outstanding loans that he could repay today if he wanted to. I think a good place to start is to investigate why.
> "All this feels"
I get it. But I think we've established that you haven't considered the way these systems actually work, so your feelings probably aren't fully contextualized.
> "is this something that actually happens"
Given that I said that I did it personally, why is my story more contrived than the imaginary people in your head that you don't know anything about?
> "They can't get a loan in Mexico?"
I think this question is a non-sequitur. On what basis should someone's right to do something in place A have any bearing on their right to do something in place B?
>Even Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, has billions of dollars in outstanding loans that he could repay today if he wanted to.
If billionaires who lack work visas can't get an auto loan because of their stock borrowing schemes, that's fine by me. I don't think progressives would have much sympathy for billionaires in the first place anyways.
More to the point people who are actually engaging in this sort of stuff probably either have citizenship, or can buy citizenship so that they're not living in the country undocumented, so your counterexample doesn't work.
>Just because you struggle to imagine doesn't mean it isn't common for reasons you don't know or think about. I think this just shows either a lack of awareness about how things really work in the world more than anything else.
You know, it's pretty ironic how you interpret my lack of ability to imagine a scenario as "lack of awareness", but you can't think of an actual working example either. You do however, seem to have enough time and words to excoriate me, so why you try again and skip the insults?
> "you can't think of an actual working example either"
I gave you the biggest working example in the world, the one where a person definitively has no objective need to take loans and does so anyway because it's deemed advantageous, and what you did in response instead of saying "oh damn, you're right, I did forget that in fact people take loans all the time against assets vs income" was try to rewrite the discussion around how progressives feel about billionaires.
> "people who are actually engaging in this sort of stuff ... either have citizenship, or can buy citizenship"
I am not rich enough to buy citizenship anywhere, and yet here I am. Your estimation of how things work is not complete.
> "so that they're not living in the country undocumented"
This is the second time now in this thread that you've replaced lack of right to work with something else entirely.
>I gave you the biggest working example in the world, the one where a person definitively has no objective need to take loans and does so anyway because it's deemed advantageous, and what you did in response instead of saying "oh damn, you're right, I did forget that in fact people take loans all the time against assets vs income" was try to rewrite the discussion around how progressives feel about billionaires.
Are you forgetting the whole context for this conversation was over people who lack authorization to work but somehow need (and can get) auto loans? Bringing up Elon Musk, who is a US citizen only fulfills half of that requirement. Not to mention he'd be getting a portfolio loan on his stock, which gets him cash, obviating the need for an auto loan specifically. Then you pretend that was the entire argument, and trying to dunk on me for not accepting it.
people commuting across borders just for work is legitimately very common all over the world. Although I'd assume they'd be able to easily secure a loan in at least ONE of those places.
"There are no illegals on stolen land" and "abolish ICE" might be totems of progressives, but they're a slim minority. Only about 16% of Americans support no deportations whatsoever.
Whether or not they're "supposed" to be here, they've been an integral part of the US economy for decades. It's cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Yeah, cat is out of the bag now. Something like 1/10 workers in California are undocumented and you can be sure it is heavily biased for certain industries. Imagine the implications of some industry losing lets say half its workforce overnight. That would be like a COVID level shock in output and in all likelihood the industry would collapse vs somehow pull needed labor in a quick amount of time, and from where exactly, who knows? National unemployment rate is only 4% not like there is much spare labor capacity.
And I'm sure the same folks complaining about undocumented laborers would be equally upset when their fruit, berries, and nuts double and triple in price as they bring in domestic labor. Or we'd just lose several domestic agriculture industries overnight.
Elon Musk and Melania Trump both overstayed their visas and aren't supposed to be here. Elon is known to have violated the terms of his visa, which under the current administration's theory of immigration renders his citizenship void and requires him to be banned from the U.S. for at least 10 years.
Nobody knows what Melania was doing between the time she arrived and the time she met Trump. She only had a handful of photoshoots shortly after she arrived, and then nothing for 3-4 years until she met Trump at a social event.
oh man, would you like the justice department to help you with affordability, boy have I got news for you, there's millions of companies stealing wages monthly; there's thousands of fraudulent corporations, including ones run directly by people in power, siphoning your hard working tax dollars.
Boy, if you really cared about justice and economics, you'd be in a completely different ballpark.
Is it creating the manual of the dystopia planner to list the excuses for totalitarism? "National security", "Personal security", "The safety of your kids", "the children"...
Or is it prodromic to a "stop talking to guts and let us put the factors in a computational framework, where all targets and constraints and consequences are laid out with their demographics"? A Cost/Risk/Benefit for policies?
Interestingly in my latino city the used car dealers catering to low income people have worked around the lack of credit for their clientelle. They will for example use proof of employment as your "credit" for financing plans rather than traditional bank metrics. This will usually be written directly on the building in spanish.
right; but the problem is that the gov spends billions on ICE instead of prosecuting companies that employ undocumented persons, so the problem doesn't really go away (but it makes for good show and gets GOP votes, which is the only reason for it in the first place)
One day hopefully another president will use the national security drum to close down all Trump golf resorts and properties on the grounds that they are used to facilitate illegal activity.
No, they used the existing system of due process to investigate whether crimes were committed at Mar-a-Lago. They didn't claim national security to shut it down.
To punish grifting garbage that sees breaking the Emoluments clause as a challenge to do as much as it can, that has attacked the welfare & good of this nation.
@dang is there a mechanism to indicate that I think a post itself is okay, but that the entire comments section attached to it should be nuked from orbit? Are we supposed to flag the post in this case?
Ah yes let’s ruin someone’s life over $200 but nobody look at Trumps accounts. He definitely was debanked for political reasons and not because he was laundering money.
the problem with Poe's Law is that when someone else violates it by misreading your sarcasm you're the one who has to pay the fine in fake internet points.
> He definitely was debanked for political reasons and not because he was laundering money.
What proof do you have? On what planet would major banks piss off the most capricious and unrestrained president in modern US history? What possible upside could there be for them? Trump (34 time fraud felon known for scamming everyone he can and using his position in government to massively enrich himself) was almost certainly "debanked" because he is doing more of the same shady shit that he's known for and the banks are obligated by the law to treat him like anyone else.
Capital One closed hundreds of Trump's accounts in 2021. Trump is suing them, claiming it's a political debanking. CapOne fighting back because they feel their AML team was correct to close those accounts.
> He definitely was debanked for political reasons and not because he was laundering money.
No, if this was serious, it would read "he was definitely debanked for political reasons. He was not laundering money". Or even better, it would have deflected and claimed something unrelated about Hunter Biden or Hillary Clinton.
Although I have to grudgingly accept that not everybody is fluent in sarcasm.
The amount of nickel-and-diming and outright being screwed over at local businesses I've experienced in my lifetime vastly eclipses generous return policies and treatment by megacorporations.
Let’s keep in mind that US corporations just received literal billions in tariff refunds, effectively stealing money from everyone who bought anything in the last year.
But i’m sure being charged an extra dollar at a small store that’s barely getting by (assuming this is true) is the real problem..
Hot take: it’s generally probably less harmful psychologically to be screwed over by an identifiable individual than a faceless mega corporation. Rationalizing a bad experience as “one bad apple” feels better than ruminating over systemic oppression.
We have similar problems in the UK. Lots of extra paperwork for small businesses and individuals, very little impact on big crime that was supposed to be the target. Just opening a bank account can be a pain, and more so if you are living abroad (whether a citizen or not).
It's pretty much everywhere after the US forced any banks with any business dealings in the US, which in practice is all of them because of how international banking networks operate, to sign up to all this crap as well. So you've got organisations like Amazon, a USD800 billion company, happily laundering their (absence of) tax payments overseas with no repercussions while Granny Smith has to fill out AML paperwork when she sells her crocheted tea cosies through an online shopping site.
The UK has also been very keen on it itself. UK law is at least as bad as the requirements imposed by the US. A lot of other countries are better.
I'd say the law has achieve exactly the effect it intended.
One might as well say "the surgeon tried to cut out the cancer; took out some healthy tissue". Yeah, that's how it goes. The existence of side effects is not convincing as a reason not to do things. The objective is to get results while minimizing undesirable side effects, but the desirable amount of side effects is not zero.
Since the cartels have no problem moving money, this is like an incompetent surgeon cutting in the wrong place, taking out entirely the wrong thing.
More like "surgeon tried to cut out the cancer, missed, cut out liver instead. Patient still has cancer"
What if you don't get results while not doing much of minimizing? And no, the "desirable" amount is zero
Then you did a bad tradeoff. Was the bad tradeoff done here?
> a violation of the fourth amendment that protects the rights of people against unreasonable searches and seizures
So there exist juridical interpretations that call monitoring low value money transfer «unreasonable searches and seizures»? This is immensely interesting. Does anyone have further info?
My question is , why don't these people have bank accounts?
> With the changes, people became reluctant to make these transactions, Ornelas said, because they worry it will open them up for government surveillance or targeting by immigration authorities in the current intensified enforcement.
Presumably, because it's hard to get a bank account in a country you aren't supposed to be in.
Unbanked folks are a large, legal population in the country. And immigration authorities recently have been less concerned about status vs if you look like you belong.
What about bank accounts from the country they're from?
You can't practically use foreign institutions for your day-to-day banking.
Someone writes you a check. Can you easily cash that with your bank in another country? Best scenario: they have a check cashing app for your phone, so you don't have to mail anything off or present in person; but will that take an American check?
Economists keep track of the number of "unbanked" people. At the lower end of the spectrum the % of "unbanked" individuals is quite high and they live almost exclusively in an all-cash economy. Particularly in immigrant communities. There are a number of problems with being "unbanked", in particular if your house is burglarized you can lose your entire life savings, and you have little to no access to formal credit, which in the US at least, is the primary path to accruing wealth or at least savings.
They systemically lock people out of banking, home ownership, employment, running a business, selling their products, getting famous, and so-on.
There's a class of people that has to have "more" than the rest. And they do that by controlling access to everything. They spend tons of money on distractions and concepts like moneylending which makes everyone have to go through the "loan" and "approval" process - of course only some people get approved lol So nobody else gets a house!
Instead of trying to become better themselves and make new discoveries, and build genuine wealth they can give back, the gatekeeping/inheritance mindset is to stop others who are trying to better themselves. To knock them back. It doesn't stop at preventing others from attaining wealth and status, they don't even want you to have a roof over your head.
If they had it their way, you wouldn't have a bank, house, car, and barely any money. You'd be wearing some goofy uniform working for them living in poverty.
Depends. Why can't banks offer more debit cards to more people and, I don't know, stop honoring overdrafts? Transactions should decline, not overdraft, even with overdraft off.
We've built lots of traps for people that have balances near-zero that keep them near zero, and one little mistake snowballs into blacklists from Telecheck, ChexSystems, and other fun companies.
Meanwhile once you can keep your balance with at least three significant zeros in it, the bank will be happy to shower you back in rewards and cashback, ripped away from the fees and interest levied to the poor.
Bank of America had a class action against them because they would reorder transactions to make you overdraft.
For example, when I was relatively poor and near 0 balance in like 2009 era I’d wait for my direct deposit to come so I could grocery shop and pay bills.
When it deposited, the funds would become available to use even though the transaction wasn’t cleared, pretty normal so far.
So say you pay 2 bills and grocery shop, come back on Monday and you’d see that your pending deposit vanished, 3 transactions cleared for 3 overdrafts, then your deposit cleared afterward.
This is just one that I know about because it happened to me. I wonder how many less blatant scams like this exist that most people aren’t even aware of.
TD Bank was slapped for the exact same process. Transactions would be reordered to ensure you incurred hundreds in overdraft fees even though you had just deposited a check.
It's a bit of reverse check kiting: The bank changing when your check clears so that you actually don't have the money you think you do.
Now, there were fine print that stated only X dollars worth of your deposit would be "Available immediately", but even that was a lie.
This is 100% true and also a tactic used by PNC when I was a near zero person. The hack around it was to try to withdraw cash, then use that. They wouldn't let you overdraft cash withdrawal. That's one anecdotal likely stale trick to avoid the traps they set.
When we had to juggle overdraft fees, our trick was to get a large money order. We would take one big overdraft with one fee and save ourselves from multiple fees while still paying multiple bills.
Interesting, PNC has never once done anything like this to me. In fact I feel that they are pretty up front about telling you what you have available and what your actual balance is.
It’s generally not something you’d notice if you’re not living on the edge of $0 balance. I’d be surprised if any banks are still doing it after the bofa settlement.
They were supposed to stop doing it 10 or so years ago. No clue if that's true. Haven't been the zero person for a while.
The problem is then you have the card number sitting in some online card wallet, set for Autopay or something, and suddenly it's just... allowed to charge you next month even though the card's got nothing.
Hell no, that shit should have bounced. Now you're in the hole $80 because your phone payment took an autopay from your Visa number.
Blindly allowing recurring auths to bypass the overdraft rules is utterly insane. Whoops, let's just autobill a few extra zeros!
Yes. It's a little sad to see other comments assume that people have something to hide for doing something as basic as wanting to send money back to family.
Banking services with hidden fees can be inherently less predictable than working with cash and fee-based financial services for folks who have low income or irregular pay.
Because then you’d have to pay taxes
I forget where I read this but I agree that if you want to know the real reason for a government policy, look at the effect is has.
It's pretty obvious what they're doing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpo...
This is my first exposure to this saying. I immediately thought of Jim Crow laws and thought it a useful way to look at systems. What is a better term for these wolf in sheep's clothing systems? I think the framing of achieved results being the purpose of the system is missing "something." The goals being different than stated feels paramount, and those goals succeeding is the system doing what it was designed to do with a wink
I'm sure POSIWID gets used as a reductive way to avoid thinking through things, but his examples seem just as devoid of thought. His 67% cancer center could probably cure more cancers if society invested more in cancer treatments and research, or if doctors persisted in continuing treatment instead of palliative care more often. Russia could nuke Kiev, or Ukraine's Western allies could send their own troops to push Russia back. The New York bus system could convert to all electric vehicles but that would cost a lot and have its own environmental considerations.
In the current conversation, the policy could have been based on research about where and how cartels were doing their laundering, and designed in a way that minimized the impact on non-cartel immigrant communities.
In all of those cases, the system is the result of choices that lead to the current outcomes, and I think that's the part that's worth thinking about.
>but his examples seem just as devoid of thought. His 67% cancer center could probably cure more cancers if society invested more in cancer treatments and research, or if doctors persisted in continuing treatment instead of palliative care more often. Russia could nuke Kiev, or Ukraine's Western allies could send their own troops to push Russia back. The New York bus system could convert to all electric vehicles but that would cost a lot and have its own environmental considerations.
Right, but the original claim wasn't "the purpose of a system is what it can accomplish subject to the political and economic constraints placed on it", it's just "the purpose of the system is what it does".
Yes, sometimes people shorten phrases when they communicate.
"The purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure as many patients as possible" seems also like an extreme? They are businesses, after all, and there will be cases that would be unreasonable to pursue?
Damn, what a waste of words. Does nothing but give brain dead examples while ignoring that the phrase is critical of systemic societal issues.
Law and order is the stated intention. The cops not solving crimes for the poor and them beating the poor is the system's purpose.
Instead of noticing that violence isn't applied equally, or that unequal resources are spent enforcing justice for the rich versus the poor, he compares it to carbon emissions from busses. Wow, how insightful.
Yes! That one, thanks.
This meme needs to die, such a complete thought terminating cliche.
I would love to better understand your thinking behind this statement, if you care to elucidate.
The Astral Codex Ten post[1] linked in the sibling comment is interesting.
[1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpo...
So there is no such thing as unintended consequences? Everything always works to the master plan?
Don't you know? Our great leaders are playing 4d chess on a higher dimension and everything they do is carefully planned and executed. Every failure and blunder is a move beyond our comprehension as part of the supreme master plan. Haven't you read The Art of War???
Obviously sarcasm... But in all seriousness, it's scary how many people genuinely believe this.
How about this:
"Our great leaders are playing 4d civilization in multiple dimensions beyond 4. Most of what they do is carefully planned and executed but there are many unknowns and there are also "unknown unknowns". There are players not sitting at the table who are pulling levers elsewhere. There are unknown players. Most moves' results are beyond our comprehension due to purely complexity and the "fog of war", not necessarily b/c of any (of many different) superficially clever 'supreme master plans'."
This is just the classic "we're going to crack down, but even harder!".
It's just the behavior of people who have no new ideas for how to solve a problem.
I wonder how much this will drive adoption of crypto for remittances.
I don’t see how. Their problem is they have cash and want to turn it into something else. The law criminalizes that transaction without reporting.
It surprises me how much Americans don't understand how deeply the cartel is in every transaction. Yes, sending money to Grandma to pay for a car is funding the cartel who probably got paid to make the car available. Grandma may even pay small direct bribes to the cartel just to be able to live her life.
Either all of Mexico can move to the US (probably not a winning solution) or we can make Mexico a safe and excellent country again, and that means getting rid of the cartel.
And yes, other countries have their issues too and we should help stabilize those countries as well.
If the Mexican government can fix their cartel issue, we can go back to normal remittances. Until then the US will make policy choices to resolve problems.
As always, the salt of the earth people will pay the cost for politicians being bad at things.
What you're suggesting is that all Mexicans suffer more because some money may somehow end up in the hands of the cartel. And that, for some reason, the US should help do this. That's absurd.
If you really want to eliminate the cartels make recreational drugs legal.
Positive effects aside, legalizing recreational drugs will not eliminate the cartels, but instead will reroute the distribution of their product through "legal" channels. The cartels have sufficient power that the only move left is their integration with established markets. They aren't just going to lie flat while "legitimate" corporations take their spot.
Legalizing has other benefits though, like increasing scrutiny into human- and arms-trafficking, a legitimized drug business will need to shed that part somehow and hide it.
Plus we have seen from italian-american gangs and certain casinos that if you force them to legitimate businesses, they eventually become legal organizations. Why continue with illegal and volatile illegal business when you have a profitable legal one?
And that’s not good?
>What you're suggesting is that all Mexicans suffer more because some money may somehow end up in the hands of the cartel.
It's not just Mexicans. Cartels don't respect borders.
> If you really want to eliminate the cartels make recreational drugs legal.
Insufficient. Avocados are already legal in the US and yet the cartels have moved into that business. Cartels follow money. They are not going to just roll over when drug money dries up.
See the documentary series Rotten on Netflix or see https://www.npr.org/2022/02/19/1081948884/mexican-drug-carte...
You give your sister $100. You find out later that she uses $50 of that money to buy heroin and inject it in herself.
Do you keep giving her the $100?
Absolutely not! This isn't even a real question.
If you directly enable a person or group of people or country to harm themselves and others, you have a duty to stop doing it.
If US remittances are directly fueling the cartel which beats, rapes, murders and even engages in torture, then not only may the US cease that but it is plainly ethically bound to do so.
Yes, this will make it hard for Grandma to buy a car.
You can't fund the people who torture and rape random Mexican farmers so Grandma can buy a car.
> If you really want to eliminate the cartels make recreational drugs legal.
While murdering drug users with their own money may seem like a clever solution, you are in fact still doing murder just in long form.
> You can't fund the people who torture and rape random Mexican farmers so Grandma can buy a car.
If you have paid taxes, or participated in the United States of Americas economy, you have directly funded the rape of indigenous Americans, the bombing of Venezuelan fisherman and Iranian schoolgirls.
How do you think the rest of the world should react to this? Total economic embargo towards the US? Leveling the continent? How should Americans who oppose rape and murder of children (like you seem to be) react to the fact that they fund rapes and murders?
You pay taxes in the US? You are directly enabling a country to harm others.
You ever buy a phone? You are directly enabling a chain of groups to harm people (in the name of creating that phone).
You ever give a dollar to a homeless man? You might be directly contributing to them harming themselves (or possibly just letting them buy food/drink).
Heck even your example about your sister, I think some people would argue that it's still the moral choice.
Clearly there's a spectrum here. Black and white thinking and statements aren't helping and shouldn't be the basis for policy decisions.
You can and should be making explicit choices in that framework.
You should not buy phones connected to the mistreatment of the Uighur population - and that is doable.
If you think the US is doing more harm than good, you are allowed to move and surrender your citizenship.
And yes, that is literally why I don't support direct cash handouts to the homeless. You can feed them and house them, you can't throw money at them and expect a good outcome.
You should not cast your money as to do harm. If your money is the difference between your sister being homeless or not, then stop giving her money and pay her rent. Buy her grocery cards.
But if you directly contribute to harm, knowably, you are enabling that harm. This is not some weird novel part of ethics. It is in fact black and white.
> If you think the US is doing more harm than good, you are allowed to move and surrender your citizenship.
Well, no, you aren't necessarily without paying a special additional tax to the US government, so it doesn't really solve the problem of believing that paying US taxes is active participation in morally intolerable actions.
> If you think the US is doing more harm than good, you are allowed to move and surrender your citizenship.
Actually, I have heard that it’s very hard, if possible at all, to surrender American citizenship. It’s a real problem for some people who had the misfortune of being born on American soil.
> And yes, that is literally why I don't support direct cash handouts to the homeless. You can feed them and house them, you can't throw money at them and expect a good outcome.
You maintain this despite all the research showing that this is the most effective way to help people?
A safe and prosperous Mexico would be a huge advantage to America. We should be investing a lot more into this.
The US has been investing heavily in Mexico. They are our top trading partner.
Something I found interesting was that China and Mexico have a similar Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) per capita income (~$26000).
> that means getting rid of the cartel.
Stop Americans buying drugs from them. Even invading Mexico won't get rid of the cartels.
I think it's possible, but pretty difficult. There's just too much money to be made selling drugs to the US.
I am against marijuana but I think it's clear legalizing it successfully starves the cartel of a lot of drug financing (and therefore we should both legalize it and have public campaigns against using it, ala alcohol).
Even the weird state based legalization has caused the cartels to pivot into things like avocado farming and mining.
Drug users don't seem to be overly preoccupied with what drug they use. Probably shifting them towards lower risk choices (pot, ketamine) and aggressively crack down on dealers is a winning combo.
(A lot of low level dealers are just graduated drug users but the line between buying and selling is a large one and dealers do immense harm while also shielding more dangerous criminals. Incentives against dealing incl aggressive enforcement are powerful at dissuading low level dealers, which in turn starves the criminal organizations.)
> Drug users don't seem to be overly preoccupied with what drug they use.
What? In the case of opiates (which is the most significant drug problem we have at the moment), users are often physically addicted to a specific substance and that addiction was often initiated by legitimate medical usage of that substance. They'll certainly care if you say "hey, you can't use heroin any more, have some weed instead".
The medical pipeline for opiate addiction has been gone for several years now.
Most users were exposed to fentanyl unknowingly through buying other tainted drugs, often expecting percocet or even ecstasy.
Some of these users do require methodone treatment, but you can't give drug users unregulated access to opiates. That is just not gonna work out. Either they are going to self taper ("stretching" their tail of their stash) or they are going to end up in a hospital and get tapered by a professional.
>Either all of Mexico can move to the US (probably not a winning solution)
Indeed, it is not.
But not for lack of trying. The biggest migration in history is the 10% of Mexico that has moved to the US since 1970. <https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1trqnn8/he...>
As of 2024, 11 million Mexican-born people live in the US. <https://ourworldindata.org/where-do-migrants-live-and-where-...>
Fron what I can tell, immigration levels right now are about the same as they were in the late 19th century, when a lot of our great grandparents first came to the US.
At that time, the scare was about the Chinese, as opposed to brown people from South of the border.
> Fron what I can tell, immigration levels right now are about the same as they were in the late 19th century, when a lot of our great grandparents first came to the US.
... and which, in turn, led to the Immigration Act of 1924, which gave the US 40 years of relief from the influx to integrate the existing population. We need another such.
What should cartel members do to successfuly integrate in the US? Buy more guns?
Where do you get the line about the biggest migration in history from? Your link seems to just be to a one sentence Reddit comment from someone with the same username as you, and no source.
Feel free to come up with another country that has sent 10% of its population over 50 years to one other country, and is large enough that that means an eight-figure population transfer.
This article is repeating a transparently false framing as the truth. This wasn't a law about cartel money laundering, which doesn't happen near the border anyway. Money laundering at scale happens in the global market and always has.
The clear purpose of the regulation was exactly the "side effect" detailed in the article: hurting immigrant communities that maintain ties across the border. And it worked. It does no one any good to pretend otherwise.
The issue is that it wasn't "clear" to sufficient people. Too many people believe at face value the claims. Some of them honestly believe the face value claims.
I'm not sure that more information will help those people. I saw an interview with a Haitian-American restaurant chain owner who voted for Trump and was dismayed that he might have to close a couple of locations due the removal of Temporary Protective Status for Haiti causing him to lose employees. He said that Trump sold him on the idea that "he was a businessman, and would act like a businessman", and that he now regrets his vote.
Like, the "eating the cats and dogs" line, specifically targeted at Haitians, wasn't enough for you to think that maybe this guy didn't have your best interest at heart? Also Trump's history as a "businessman" is anything but wildly successful or something to envy.
These people will see whatever they want to see until they get hit, so unless you're in a position to provide the hit, or somehow impart discernment that most elementary school kids have, they can only be contained and we should be happy if they pay their taxes and don't vote.
> Also Trump's history as a "businessman" is anything but wildly successful or something to envy.
Maybe we should stop treating these contradictions with Polyanna level of naivety. What is more likely: a.) these people did not seen the obvious contradictions or b.) these people are giving out publicly palatable sympathetic responses. It is all economic vote, except that conservatives were never good for small businesses.
What if these people are not as dumb as they pretend to be. What if they are actually attracted to the same thing that makes other men attracted to Trump - the male supremacy ideology and the racism against "not them exactly". The fun ugly part of it. The cruelty against homosexuals and trans. Saying that openly will still makes you look bad, so we get the "we had no idea, this was just economic vote" kind of nonsense.
One can be both malicious and naive. Regardless, more information isn't going to solve the issue. The information was presented; they ignored it for whatever reason.
Getting them to stop ignoring information they don't like is the problem.
> What if these people ... What if
What if we got proper stats instead of adding slices to the pie chart not knowing how big they are.
"What if they were all perverts". Well, that would have been remarkable in the distribution of chances.
> What if we got proper stats
We have plenty of those, we are just ignoring them.
> "What if they were all perverts". Well, that would have been remarkable in the distribution of chances.
There would be absolutely nothing remarkable about distribution of chances here. It is the most plausible and explanation. It is also completely consistent with all the data we have - including the fact that record of abuse never harms republican politicians. Instead, it raises their credit. It is also consistent with philosophies the leadership openly pushes for.
Its a particularly galling policy for disproportionately hurting small businesses given the number of money laundering, sanctions avoidance, etc big fish Trump has pardoned, ended investigations and enforcement generally.
not to mention a certain financial firm cancelling trump on suspicions of HIS money laundering lol
The belief that all the people you yourselves elected are lying all the time and openly out to get you is such an uniquely Gringo idea it's entirely possible the migrants in this community, like the one showcased in the article, mistakenly took the racists' word at face value.
Retrospectively, looking at the various kinds of concentration camps set up all over the country, that might have been a bad choice to make. But that doesn't make it a less reasonable one at the time.
in fairness: the people we elected lie a lot and one of them has built a personal army that he uses to fill the concentration camps you allude to.
Money laundering is an absurd concept. People should be free to transfer money to whoever they like, without permission. It is a fundamental purpose of money. To deny this purpose puts the validity of particular money into question. Putting up fences results in a very high rate of false positives. No wonder people use crypto as they should.
If you want to go after cartels, then actually go after cartels. That's not what they're doing.
> Money laundering is an absurd concept. People should be free to transfer money to whoever they like, without permission.
They got Al Capone for tax evasion, not any of the other obviously illegal stuff he was doing. I don't know the details, but I imagine it was because he put in effort to create an organization that made it difficult-to-impossible for the law-abiding feds to go after him directly. That's why it's important to also prohibit the ancillary activities of crime.
And money laundering isn't an absurd concept, it just means it's additionally illegal to conceal the origin of illicit income.
If you want to get all dogmatic against stuff like laws against money laundering, come up with an effective alternative. Otherwise those laws aren't going anywhere and few will care about your objections, because they're unreasonable.
> If you want to get all dogmatic against stuff like laws against money laundering, come up with an effective alternative
No, it's not just a matter of alternatives: it is also a matter of principles.
For example: in europe, I am unable to make online purchases with electronic money, as all the payment devices are tracked, matched with a personal identity - they cannot be unidentified as they could be only a few years ago. There existed occasional cards for online shopping - now they ask you a local telephone number, identity tied. This under the excuse of "countering money laundering". So there you have "privacy" vs "financial monitoring" - with immensely disproportionate effects in a farcical manouvre.
Obvious solution is to make soft drugs like fentanyl fully legal. Just apply sufficient purity to standards as regulation like with any other drug. Issue solved instantly. It is not like other deathly drugs aren't already legal.
Obvious solution is to make soft drugs like fentanyl fully legal. Just apply sufficient purity to standards as regulation like with any other drug. Issue solved instantly. It is not like other deathly drugs aren't already legal. [emphasis mine]
sarcasm or typo?
Just pointing out the double standards and the main funding source being due to illegality. And we all known how many people die due to ethanol each year. But because it is drug of the choice by too many totalitarian fascists it won't get banned like other drugs do.
> Just pointing out the double standards and the main funding source being due to illegality. And we all known how many people die due to ethanol each year. But because it is drug of the choice by too many totalitarian fascists it won't get banned like other drugs do.
Alcohol is a drug with a huge amount of cultural significance going back millennia. Don't be a robot: it's in a different category and not a double standard.
Buy yeah, one easy solution to crime problems is just to make everything legal. Sure, it totally misses the point, but it seems very clever to the software engineer mind.
So it clearly is double-standard. Excusing it with "cultural significance" is clear example of something being double standard. And it is one of the worst reasons to have. Genital mutilation of children of both genders is also of "cultural significance" so I take those supporting allowing it are also reasonable? Or is that a different category because it is not your culture?
If keeping it illegal is not working clearly best move forward might be to look at making it legal thus solving the issue. And that does not miss a point. Lot of stuff previously illegal has been made legal. So why not drugs like fentanyl?
> So it clearly is double-standard. Excusing it with "cultural significance" is clear example of something being double standard. And it is one of the worst reasons to have. Genital mutilation of children of both genders is also of "cultural significance" so I take those supporting allowing it are also reasonable? Or is that a different category because it is not your culture?
No. Frankly, it just means you're being zealous and small-minded: hyper-focusing on little bits (and feeling very self-righteous as a result) without looking at the whole picture. Demanding the world conform to whatever limited understanding you have of it. I see it all the time.
Alcohol is its own category, whether you chose to recognize it or not. That's the truth, so quit whining about it.
> If keeping it illegal is not working clearly best move forward might be to look at making it legal thus solving the issue. And that does not miss a point. Lot of stuff previously illegal has been made legal. So why not drugs like fentanyl?
Because it opiates being legal and freely available was not working? Ignoring your myopia for a minute, what you're really advocating for is a dumb oscillation between the problems of legalized opiates and illegal opiates, because you're letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
I don't think you are ready for constructive non-zealous open-minded discussion which objectively looks at whole thing without any previous biases or and wider understanding. So it is pointless to continue this discussion as you are not ready to take it honestly.
> I don't think you are ready for constructive non-zealous open-minded discussion which objectively looks at whole thing without any previous biases or and wider understanding. So it is pointless to continue this discussion as you are not ready to take it honestly.
Heh. I mean, you're the one who's been refusing to look outside your narrow focus to "look at the whole thing" and rejecting "wider understandings" (e.g. the actual cultural significance of alcohol, the well-understood negative effects of freely available opioids), but whatever. You be you, and twist things however you need to save face.
Fentanyl is not a soft drug, but opium, heroin and morphine can be so if administered correctly, and meet the same needs satisfactorily. Fentanyl is extremely deadly if misdosed.
> come up with an effective alternative
I already did, and noted it in my parent comment if you actually read it. The alternative is crypto. It works. To use your own words back at you, no one who needs to transmit money freely will care about your silly objections, because they're unreasonable.
If money laundering is not absurd, then electricity laundering for the purpose of a crime must similarly not be absurd. Everyone must be required to provide documentation of their electricity usage and spikes. After all it could be used to conduct a crime, and we can lower crime by having laws against electricity laundering. /s
In truth, many little brains that I am interacting with here seem to be having trouble with letting abstractions be abstractions. A society can be at rest only when it doesn't have to think twice about its abstractions, otherwise it will never know peace. The same people also can't rewind to see how foolish the war on drugs is in the first place.
>> come up with an effective alternative
> I already did, and noted it in my parent comment if you actually read it. The alternative is crypto.
No you didn't, you totally misunderstood what I meant. I was not talking about an alternative payment system that "bypasses" anti-money laundering regulations, but alternative regulations.
> It works. To use your own words back at you, no one who needs to transmit money freely will care about your silly objections, because they're unreasonable.
It doesn't "work." Not wanting to facilitate the transfer of money derived from crime is not a "silly objection."
Also you seem to be confused about the difference between the crime of money laundering and anti-money laundering regulations.
You're seeing it exclusively from the perspective of an oppressive government, not the people. You do not serve the people, only the oligarchs. It is why your argument has no merit to the people who seek freedom. This is not a forum for government propaganda.
Money laundering is about hiding illegal actions by faking the source of the money.
Generally speaking, it makes sense to me that a society wants to make that difficult.
If the underlying action is illegal, then go after the underlying action, LOL. How many millions of innocents have to suffer for one crook to be caught?
To use your own words back at you, generally speaking, it makes sense that a society wants to make the lives of its citizens easier, not more convoluted.
The truth about money laundering is a label used by the government to repress innocent individuals by burdening them under regulations.
> If the underlying action is illegal, then go after the underlying action,
Sure, but the best way to know there is illegal action is to flag money that comes out of nowhere.
> How many millions of innocents have to suffer for one crook to be caught?
You seem to be under the wrong expression that the article is about money laundering, but it is not, that's just the legal framework used to achieve the goal. If it weren't for money laundering, they works have chosen something else to achieve their goals.
> Money laundering is an absurd concept. People should be free to transfer money to whoever they like, without permission.
This ignores that taxes are a thing that need enforcement. Its like saying basic necessities should be free, the world should be without pollution, or cancer shouldn't exist.
Well of course they should be. You have been brainwashed so much that you can't even conceive of a different world.
For taxes, I favor land value tax. Basic necessities can absolutely be free under it, as the super rich hold plenty of land. We can have a world without much pollution if we switch away from fossil fuels, and if we take the lifecycle of chemicals into account. Note that excesss carbon dioxide is pollution too. Regarding cancer, medical science is working toward it.
> Well of course they should be. You have been brainwashed so much that you can't even conceive of a different world.
Assuming you are talking about free basic necessities: I can conceive it fine, I just also understand that conceiving doesn't mean it will work, and history has shown it won't. Me making the statement was itself conception no?
I can conceive of a million different economic systems, but I also understand most of them are infeasible, and the risk of running the experiment is extremely high, with little to gain in a my country, where obesity is a much larger problem than starving.
Everything I noted is entirely feasible. It is not pie in the sky. In fact, history has shown that it works. The risk is more pronounced with inaction than with action. If you have a decent imagination and a fuller appreciation for history, you would see it.
> It is not pie in the sky
Define "pie in the sky", because you have described the utopia that every eco-socialist has been chasing for 100 years...
The problem that makes it infeasible isn't the math, or the technology, it's people. Communism would work beautifully... if everyone in the world was different.
Huh. I did not ask for communism, nor do I believe in it. I do believe that people need to be rewarded for their effort. Democratic socialism and social democracy are sufficiently different from communism. When people's basic survival needs are met, which is the goal, they can be more free to pursue entrepreneurial and creative endeavors, otherwise they stay stuck in a minimum-wage job as under the current system. In the decades to come, minimum wage jobs need to be replaced by AI anyway, even physical robotic AI. It doesn't make sense to do by hand what can be automated.
A system where the population's wealth disparity keeps getting worse is nothing to be proud of. There have been systems of government in history where the system's total wealth made everyone more equal while preserving the reward for effort.
Everybody here falls for the most obvious bait.
He's also making it difficult/impossible for people without work visas to obtain auto loans which is destroying the used car market in latino communities and cities with large latino populations. Executive Order 14406 defends this with,
> Low-dollar cross-border funds transfers have been used to facilitate or commit terrorist financing, narcotics trafficking, human trafficking, and other illegal activity.
They're banging the national security drum to make it unlivable here for some.
>He's also making it difficult/impossible for people without work visas to obtain auto loans [...]
>They're banging the national security drum to make it unlivable here for some.
But they're not supposed to be here in the first place? As for the people who are supposed to be here, but are collateral damage (ie. "which is destroying the used car market in latino communities") should we have sympathy for people in such situations? If a local casino is laundering money for drug cartels, but that casino funds the community because it employs workers, should we be against the FBI coming in and busting the casino? What if it's more benign than drug cartels, like run of the mill securities fraud?
But they're not supposed to be here in the first place?
Like any other system, the purpose is what the system actually does. Especially a system that's been around for decades.
We let them in, so they can work our fields and process our meat and whatever else. We shouldn't be surprised they want to buy cars, own business, and do other completely normal things.
>Like any other system, the purpose is what the system actually does. Especially a system that's been around for decades.
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49260422
>We let them in, so they can work our fields and process our meat and whatever else. We shouldn't be surprised they want to buy cars, own business, and do other completely normal things.
So if the city/state/federal government lets a drug addict/dealer population to exist for too long (despite their best efforts at cracking down), they'll eventually get grandfathered in, and we can't enforce anti-money laundering regulations or dismantle their crack dens?
The GOP has used immigration as a drum to beat since I became politically aware back in the Bill Clinton days. They've had numerous chances since then to fix immigration in one way or another, but they have not done so. They make a lot of noise. They build a few miles of fence. But, mostly they keep the system the same. Because they NEED that drum to beat.
Not remotely the same thing as Ukraine's army being stuck in a war they cannot win. Or whatever other not-quite-apt comparisons you want to make.
>Not remotely the same thing as Ukraine's army being stuck in a war they cannot win. Or whatever other not-quite-apt comparisons you want to make.
Did you get to comparison #3?
>The purpose of the British government is to propose a controversial new sentencing policy, stand firm in the face of protests for a while, then cave in after slightly larger protests and agree not to pass the policy after all.
>...
>The purpose of the British government is to govern Britain. But different British people disagree on how they should be governed, and sometimes one or another faction gets more power, so the government sometimes flip-flops about what it wants.
More to the point, the point isn't that POSWID is always false, it's that you can't use it as a thought terminating cliche in place of an actual argument.
"They might associate with the undocumented, therefore shouldn't be allowed to do normal things" was completely reductive.
Looking at El Paso, since it was the first city mentioned in the article, the entire city is about 25% immigrants (>200,000 people). And of that, more that 75% is here legally. So, 150,000 give or take, that according to your first comment, shouldn't be allowed to do business because there are illegals nearby?
>See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49260422
Doesn't seem to be particularly well received nor does it respond to any of the obvious criticisms.
I mean it makes sense. Let them come and work illegally, which is much cheaper and enables proper exploitation and then blame them for all kind of things and frame them as the bad guys that exploit the society.
I see lots of finger pointing at the workers without permits, but zero, and I mean really ZERO finger pointing at their employers. So basically it's totally fine and dandy to exploit poor people, but a crime to be poor people. All the rest is technicalities.
In Europe it's the other way around: the businesses employing folks with no right to work get fined to death, with no direct repercussions on the workers (except they lose that income, which is another discussion)
Oh, there is such a rich history of exploiting the underprivileged in the US. The more interesting bits lately center around a special visa for agricultural migrant workers, called the H2-A, which offers some basic worker protections (a minimum wage indexed to inflation, freedom to leave the farm, etc) so the employers can continue to pay low wages for long hours, keeping food prices low and profits high.
Except the farm businesses complained, and the Trump Department of Labor rolled back a bunch of the protections. For example, apparently a sticking point was the requirement that vehicles transporting visa holders have seatbelts for all occupants, so that was eliminated. Another was the requirement that workers be allowed to have guests visit them on employer-provided housing; an often-cited example is worship services provided by a priest. Also rolled back, too onerous.
This is all being stressed at historically high levels as immigration crackdowns continue. Essentially, food production in border states is increasingly forced to go through this visa program that has terrible oversight and protections that I consider below-par. It's not a sexy issue to yell about with a megaphone though.
If we want to stop illegal immigration, "not getting a car loan" and "harder to move money across the border" feel like the most humane ways to slow it down.
Plus, the drug trade coming in from Mexico is, in fact, a huge problem, not just for the US, but for Mexico itself. Mexico is run by cartels specifically because of how much money is made off selling drugs to Americans. This isn't some non-existent problem they are using as cover.
> If we want to stop illegal immigration, "not getting a car loan" and "harder to move money across the border" feel like the most humane ways to slow it down.
I can think of a more humane way: Prosecuting the employers who break the law by hiring undocumented workers. The prospect of employment is what draws migrants here in the first place.
It’s the only effective method and they basically refuse to do it. Which is a clear sign: the goal is not to “effectively and efficiently stop illegal immigration”. It’s to “cruelly and brutally punish illegal immigrants”. You will see some overlap between those two, but not much. Which is why our Stephen Miller executive policy is the way it is right now.
I think it's rather, keep those people around as useful scapegoats for empowering whatever next unpopular policy the oligarchy needs enacted to round up their next trillion.
>Prosecuting the employers who break the law by hiring undocumented workers.
Don't employers already have to check for authorization to work?
That's the breaking the law part.
Source? I've heard of companies hiring undocumented workers, but that's not the same as knowingly hiring them, or failing to do checks. For instance, the workers could have used stolen/forged SSNs.
At least in construction related industries, it's an open secret that tons of the workers are illegally working. Even if companies do the bare minimum required by law to check for work documents, they do it once and never think about it again. Smaller companies will sometimes just pay in cash off the books.
They are supposed to be using e-verify for that
How is taking away their ability to earn money at all more humane than not giving them a car loan? I'm genuinely confused how you are ranking those two things.
Sure, let them earn all the money they want so long as they walk there?
So, walking is worse than unemployment? I'm just asking where the ranking is coming from.
I'm not ranking anything, I agreed with you. Does it seem stupid or something? I don't get your problem
> feel like the most humane ways to slow it down
(Let us not feel:) How many innocent economic actors does the regulation hit.
Nationalize businesses who get caught working with a permitless immigrant would be far, far more effective.
It ensure real checks, ensure that when the immigrant work permit expire, the employer have an incentive to help renew it (that alone ouwld probably solve 70 to 90% of illegal "aliens"
Everything else aside,
> "people without work visas"
is not the same legal category as
> "they're not supposed to be here"
People with tourist visas I expect fully entitled and able to get car loans... (Edit: maybe I am misunderstanding the whole thing: is it "loaning cars" or is it "loaning the money to buy cars"?)
In the US, we usually refer to "paying someone to borrow a car" as a car "rental" and "borrowing money to finance a car purchase" as a car "loan".
A car loan is usually loaning money for the purpose of buying a car, not loaning a car.
getting a long term loan to buy a car sounds like it would signal intention to be more than a tourist.
As the edit in the post tells you, I initially interpreted «auto loans» as "car rentals" - "lending an auto".
1. So you'd agree that AI datecenter with 100 (or whatever) jet turbines merely "lacks a permit" rather than "not supposed to be there"?
2. Practically speaking, how many people lack a work visa (or similar documentation), but are supposed to be here?
Anecdotally speaking, I've personally lived in multiple countries on multi-year-long temporary resident visas without the right to work, because getting the right to work is a separate process from being allowed to be somewhere. So have family members. And in case it makes a difference, which it might, one of those countries was the US.
In fact, did you know, in Canada it doesn't count as work for visa purposes if you work over the internet for a foreign company and get paid into a foreign bank account and don't compete professionally with local interests? (This is a free hot tip for anyone wanting to live in Canada. It might be true in some other places too, but I don't know.)
>Anecdotally speaking, I've personally lived in multiple countries on multi-year-long temporary resident visas without the right to work, because getting the right to work is a separate process from being allowed to be somewhere. So have family members. And in case it makes a difference, which it might, one of those countries was the US.
Usually those long term visas (eg. student visas, I guess) require some sort of extra vetting to acquire (ie. they're not the tourist visas that get auto-issued at the border), and therefore are unlikely to be possessed by "people who aren't supposed to be here", so as a practical matter I agree they should be accepted in place of a "work visa".
> in Canada it doesn't count as work for visa purposes if you work over the internet for a foreign company and get paid into a foreign bank account and don't compete professionally with local interests?
Source? If you can do that, a Canadian could too. So you're directly competing with "local interests".
> Source?
See e.g. https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/co...
Also:https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/regulations/SOR-2002-227...
Which directs us to https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/regulations/SOR-2002-227... > If you can do that, a Canadian could too. So you're directly competing with "local interests".You may send your letter of complaint to the Government of Canada's department of Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship.
I'm kidding. :) I guess the interests to which you're referring are just tautologically not the interests I meant. Apologies for the confusion.
Fascinating!
Right?!
Spouses of folks on many kinds of visa are allowed to be here, but aren't allowed to work.
So why would anyone give a loan to someone who can't legally work? If it's really spouse that's the sole earner, why not have the spouse take out the loan?
Ability to work in a particular place and ability to repay a loan are not the same thing:
1) People get loans against assets literally all the time.
2) People can live and work in different places.
>1) People get loans against assets literally all the time.
Typically in these cases, there's actually a source of income. You have to pay back the loan, after all. Otherwise I struggle to imagine why anyone without income but with plenty of assets would take out a loan, and having such documentation requirements would greatly inconvenience them. All this feels like a fig leaf for allowing workers lacking work visas to live and work in the US, while turning a blind eye.
>2) People can live and work in different places.
Again, is this something that actually happens, or is it just a contrived scenario? Is there really a large contingent of people working Mexico and then commuting back and forth to the US? They can't get a loan in Mexico?
> "Typically in these cases, there's actually a source of income."
You mean that there's a demonstrated ability to repay the loan, which isn't the same thing. I say this as a person who has taken many loans in my life, including ones while not working. Anyway that's up to the lender to sort out isn't it?
> "Otherwise I struggle to imagine why anyone without income but with plenty of assets would take out a loan"
Just because you struggle to imagine doesn't mean it isn't common for reasons you don't know or think about. I think this just shows some missing awareness about how things really work in the world more than anything else. Even Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, has billions of dollars in outstanding loans that he could repay today if he wanted to. I think a good place to start is to investigate why.
> "All this feels"
I get it. But I think we've established that you haven't considered the way these systems actually work, so your feelings probably aren't fully contextualized.
> "is this something that actually happens"
Given that I said that I did it personally, why is my story more contrived than the imaginary people in your head that you don't know anything about?
> "They can't get a loan in Mexico?"
I think this question is a non-sequitur. On what basis should someone's right to do something in place A have any bearing on their right to do something in place B?
>Even Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, has billions of dollars in outstanding loans that he could repay today if he wanted to.
If billionaires who lack work visas can't get an auto loan because of their stock borrowing schemes, that's fine by me. I don't think progressives would have much sympathy for billionaires in the first place anyways.
More to the point people who are actually engaging in this sort of stuff probably either have citizenship, or can buy citizenship so that they're not living in the country undocumented, so your counterexample doesn't work.
>Just because you struggle to imagine doesn't mean it isn't common for reasons you don't know or think about. I think this just shows either a lack of awareness about how things really work in the world more than anything else.
You know, it's pretty ironic how you interpret my lack of ability to imagine a scenario as "lack of awareness", but you can't think of an actual working example either. You do however, seem to have enough time and words to excoriate me, so why you try again and skip the insults?
> "you can't think of an actual working example either"
I gave you the biggest working example in the world, the one where a person definitively has no objective need to take loans and does so anyway because it's deemed advantageous, and what you did in response instead of saying "oh damn, you're right, I did forget that in fact people take loans all the time against assets vs income" was try to rewrite the discussion around how progressives feel about billionaires.
> "people who are actually engaging in this sort of stuff ... either have citizenship, or can buy citizenship"
I am not rich enough to buy citizenship anywhere, and yet here I am. Your estimation of how things work is not complete.
> "so that they're not living in the country undocumented"
This is the second time now in this thread that you've replaced lack of right to work with something else entirely.
>I gave you the biggest working example in the world, the one where a person definitively has no objective need to take loans and does so anyway because it's deemed advantageous, and what you did in response instead of saying "oh damn, you're right, I did forget that in fact people take loans all the time against assets vs income" was try to rewrite the discussion around how progressives feel about billionaires.
Are you forgetting the whole context for this conversation was over people who lack authorization to work but somehow need (and can get) auto loans? Bringing up Elon Musk, who is a US citizen only fulfills half of that requirement. Not to mention he'd be getting a portfolio loan on his stock, which gets him cash, obviating the need for an auto loan specifically. Then you pretend that was the entire argument, and trying to dunk on me for not accepting it.
people commuting across borders just for work is legitimately very common all over the world. Although I'd assume they'd be able to easily secure a loan in at least ONE of those places.
It's borders that aren't supposed to be there, not people.
"There are no illegals on stolen land" and "abolish ICE" might be totems of progressives, but they're a slim minority. Only about 16% of Americans support no deportations whatsoever.
https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2025...
I genuinely don't understand how some people are allowed to post so much culture war slop all over this website
So what is your point? They are wrong.
Whether or not they're "supposed" to be here, they've been an integral part of the US economy for decades. It's cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Yeah, cat is out of the bag now. Something like 1/10 workers in California are undocumented and you can be sure it is heavily biased for certain industries. Imagine the implications of some industry losing lets say half its workforce overnight. That would be like a COVID level shock in output and in all likelihood the industry would collapse vs somehow pull needed labor in a quick amount of time, and from where exactly, who knows? National unemployment rate is only 4% not like there is much spare labor capacity.
And I'm sure the same folks complaining about undocumented laborers would be equally upset when their fruit, berries, and nuts double and triple in price as they bring in domestic labor. Or we'd just lose several domestic agriculture industries overnight.
Elon Musk and Melania Trump both overstayed their visas and aren't supposed to be here. Elon is known to have violated the terms of his visa, which under the current administration's theory of immigration renders his citizenship void and requires him to be banned from the U.S. for at least 10 years.
Nobody knows what Melania was doing between the time she arrived and the time she met Trump. She only had a handful of photoshoots shortly after she arrived, and then nothing for 3-4 years until she met Trump at a social event.
oh man, would you like the justice department to help you with affordability, boy have I got news for you, there's millions of companies stealing wages monthly; there's thousands of fraudulent corporations, including ones run directly by people in power, siphoning your hard working tax dollars.
Boy, if you really cared about justice and economics, you'd be in a completely different ballpark.
Is it creating the manual of the dystopia planner to list the excuses for totalitarism? "National security", "Personal security", "The safety of your kids", "the children"...
Or is it prodromic to a "stop talking to guts and let us put the factors in a computational framework, where all targets and constraints and consequences are laid out with their demographics"? A Cost/Risk/Benefit for policies?
Interestingly in my latino city the used car dealers catering to low income people have worked around the lack of credit for their clientelle. They will for example use proof of employment as your "credit" for financing plans rather than traditional bank metrics. This will usually be written directly on the building in spanish.
Why don't they have work visas?
Visas are capped and farmers don't want to pay for pesky safety things like seatbelts in the transportation vans.
Because some sectors depend on a cheap work force without any rights.
Perhaps they shouldn't
right; but the problem is that the gov spends billions on ICE instead of prosecuting companies that employ undocumented persons, so the problem doesn't really go away (but it makes for good show and gets GOP votes, which is the only reason for it in the first place)
Then they wouldnt exist. Society has decided its better for them to exist off the back of undocumented labor than to not exist
One day hopefully another president will use the national security drum to close down all Trump golf resorts and properties on the grounds that they are used to facilitate illegal activity.
That already happened: https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/08/politics/mar-a-lago-search-wa...
No, they used the existing system of due process to investigate whether crimes were committed at Mar-a-Lago. They didn't claim national security to shut it down.
They should have when that photo of bankers boxes worth of documents stacked up in a bathroom was released. Oh "but her emails!"
Oh ok you want the government to create an extrajudicial process to punish political opponents. Sounds kinda like Facism.
sometimes you gotta fight fire with fire :)
:O
To punish grifting garbage that sees breaking the Emoluments clause as a challenge to do as much as it can, that has attacked the welfare & good of this nation.
And it's not new. He is a money launderer. His friends are bad bad bad people. Grift is what he has always done, is the only thing he knows. https://bsky.app/profile/justinschuh.com/post/3msqa7ggcc22p
Fascism is good when I do it because my opponents deserve it :3
@dang is there a mechanism to indicate that I think a post itself is okay, but that the entire comments section attached to it should be nuked from orbit? Are we supposed to flag the post in this case?
Ah yes let’s ruin someone’s life over $200 but nobody look at Trumps accounts. He definitely was debanked for political reasons and not because he was laundering money.
the problem with Poe's Law is that when someone else violates it by misreading your sarcasm you're the one who has to pay the fine in fake internet points.
Internet points are real and carry weight. Online friends are real, too.
I live for downvotes tbh
> He definitely was debanked for political reasons and not because he was laundering money.
What proof do you have? On what planet would major banks piss off the most capricious and unrestrained president in modern US history? What possible upside could there be for them? Trump (34 time fraud felon known for scamming everyone he can and using his position in government to massively enrich himself) was almost certainly "debanked" because he is doing more of the same shady shit that he's known for and the banks are obligated by the law to treat him like anyone else.
My post was sarcastic. July 12th Capital One said they closed accounts due to AML concerns.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/capital-one-close-trump-ac...
My bad. I hear stuff like this all the time, not expressed sarcastically.
I think the parent post was sarcasm.
Capital One closed hundreds of Trump's accounts in 2021. Trump is suing them, claiming it's a political debanking. CapOne fighting back because they feel their AML team was correct to close those accounts.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/capital-one-says-it...
Thanks, I misread the parents sarcasm for garden variety MAGA comment.
Congratulations on your humour bypass! I hear it's a difficult surgery. You must have had a good surgeon.
And to think I have censored my "Welcome to the Internet, where you will find post-flatearthers that believe in the shape of a 2.5d Moebius bottle".
Given the type of things vocal people believe, no, posters must know we cannot assume people be joking.
> He definitely was debanked for political reasons and not because he was laundering money.
No, if this was serious, it would read "he was definitely debanked for political reasons. He was not laundering money". Or even better, it would have deflected and claimed something unrelated about Hunter Biden or Hillary Clinton.
Although I have to grudgingly accept that not everybody is fluent in sarcasm.
The amount of nickel-and-diming and outright being screwed over at local businesses I've experienced in my lifetime vastly eclipses generous return policies and treatment by megacorporations.
Let’s keep in mind that US corporations just received literal billions in tariff refunds, effectively stealing money from everyone who bought anything in the last year.
But i’m sure being charged an extra dollar at a small store that’s barely getting by (assuming this is true) is the real problem..
Hot take: it’s generally probably less harmful psychologically to be screwed over by an identifiable individual than a faceless mega corporation. Rationalizing a bad experience as “one bad apple” feels better than ruminating over systemic oppression.
If this were true there wouldn't be any "mom-and-pop businesses" left. But they're still present and making money.
So I call this "horse puckey"!