He's not downplaying it, he's acknowledging it and saying he doesn't care. Because until the left adopts the abundance agenda and repudiates degrowth, global warming solutions need to fall by the wayside.
> A third order ends offshore leasing for wind energy until further notice. It also stops and mandates a review of all wind leasing and permitting practices. I don’t know enough about this topic to understand whether this is good or bad. It isn’t necessarily anti-abundance if the federal government has been unjustifiably prioritizing wind as an inefficient source of energy.
"This looks bad, but here's a reason why it *might* not be bad, which I'm not going to look into further for fear of proving myself wrong."
> Regarding the section “Symbolic Nonsense” above, I think that there is perhaps something serious here worth thinking about, which is that the left used to get its way on language, and this contributed to an all-pervasive feeling that they were in control. Pronouns sort of work like this, along with consistently coming up with new phrases like BIPOC. When conservatives do things such as rename the Gulf of Mexico and eliminate all uses of the word “gender” in the federal government, that can have a subtle but nonetheless real effect on culture.
I don't think this will work. The power of woke language changes came from its grassroots nature and philosophical backing; everyone around you was telling you you had to say different things, everyone afraid of being jumped on if they didn't join in, and you couldn't just say "I don't wanna" because there were a litany of laborious-to-debunk reasons why this made you a bad person.
A ham-handed top-down proclamation doesn't have nearly the same power. Your average Joe can just go on calling it the Gulf of Mexico and suffer no consequences. If anything I think this just makes MAGA look sad and pathetic; unable to wield power in ways that matter, so they resort to naming random geological features after themselves, which everyone else ignores.
The top-down proclamation has an effect though because millions of conservatives will go along and create certain pressure. Trump isn’t standing on an island here issuing proclamations, he represents one of the two political tribes. Also woke language down to the way we classify race in some cases actually was top down, see my book for details.
Pronouns was top-down and enforced through stigma and social and economic punishment.
I had a wine friend turn against her progressive friends after she was repeatedly attacked for accidentally using the wrong pronouns. She was trying but apparently not hard enough. It’s hard to keep saying she to a 200 pound man with lipstick in a mini skirt.
Sad and pathetic is believing men belong in women’s prisons because feelings. Also dangerous and anti-woman.
On immigration: "cruelty" is often necessary when others use empathy to manipulate you. Nationalists claim ownership of their nation and the right to protect what is theirs.
Imagine thinking that being in the US on a non immigrant temporary visa and giving birth in the U.S. means your child had automatic citizenship. Pure entitlement!
No American on a student visa in France can pop out a baby and demand and expect citizenship.
Would love Richard to go after all the cruel bigoted Western nations that deny their this right to foreign nationals.
Don't think you understand your own US immigration system. Nobody gets an immigrant visa (i.e., green card) directly on their own merits. One way is to be related to a US citizen, and then get on a queue. The other way is to obtain one of the many "temporary" work visas (H-1B being just one example) and then apply for a green card, and then get on a queue. That's it. Being a student doesn't qualify (the US govt explicitly asks you to make a commitment to return to your home country after graduation), so I can understand if their kids are excluded from this (even though it may be tough for a student who hopes to get a work visa after graduation.)
> (the US govt explicitly asks you to make a commitment to return to your home country after graduation), so I can understand if their kids are excluded from this
So the parents come the the USA and have a child while they are freshmen and then go home to India 3 years later and leave their 3 year old in the USA. And you "can understand" that
You have reading comprehension issues. I explicitly excluded students and included "guest" workers when I argued for retaining birthright citizenship for kids.
Ok, let me spell it out. The law allows H-1B visa holders to apply for a green card via their employers. While the green card application is pending, the visa holder’s H-1B visa can continue to be extended for an indefinite amount of time following the 3 or 6 year period, as the case may be. For almost all nationalities other than India or China or Mexico or Philippines, there is no meed for a single extension as they get green cards approved within 3 or so years. But because of a per country annual cap on green cards, workers from heavily populated countries like India get on a queue that increases in length every year. Where a worker from Portugal or Malaysia or Somalia can get a green card in 3 years, an Indian co-worker doing a similar job may have to wait decades literally.
You aren't protecting anything. You are keeping your fellow countrymen from voluntarily hiring who they want to hire, or from voluntarily renting out their properties.
No one suggests that migrants should be allowed to take your stuff.
Do you really not know the nationalist case? Do you think we are talking about stealing bikes? No we are talking about the problems of mass migration stealing opportunity costs by having to focus on those issues (DEI is an example, look at how much was given to black and brown people in a zero sum manner)
I think there is a missing point about imo the biggest world impacting event. The designation of cartels as terrorist entities and how it might turn into a proxy war on the backyard of America.
Trump pumping a shitcoin flew under the radar but I really think that it’s so despicable I would have no issue with impeachment. And I enthusiastically voted for him.
Political favors doled out to oil corporations -- wow, what an exciting new age! So different than the previous 100 years of GOP policy.
But seriously, does Trump actually not realize that the US is the Saudi Arabia of wind and solar? And that these technologies will lead to energy independence without relying on a dwindling, obsolete, dirty 19th-century technology? And that the renewable energy industry is poised to usher in a new Industrial Revolution that will massively benefit US workers and the economy?
Or, we can just let China rake in those trillions.... Because it's fun to troll the libs, amirite?
While I'm all in on Trump's anti-woke and immigration EOs, his energy policy reveals himself to be yet another in a long line of fossil fuel industry arse-kissers... Pathetic.
I have no opinion on whether that's the best option, specifically whether it's better than using other forms of power and no batteries. But it's entirely feasible to use batteries.
Batteries are so good these days at holding charge, you can even use them for seasonal storage.
(By load shaping I mean eg contracts with consumers, especially industrial consumers, that give them very cheap power in general if they agree to be shut off when spot prices go up too much.)
As far as I know, unless we get the hydrogen sulfide tech or some other waaay cheaper battery technology system going, we dont have the minerals to do that. And by that I mean just in the world, being mined. There isnt enough just copper, for instance, to electrify just the UK. Could replace it with aluminum for a lot of things, but my point is that even just generous back of the napkin math cant get there. To say nothing of the amount of coal needed for polysilicate production and carbon fiber, or cobalt. Nickel has largely been solved which is cool (current production cant meet it but some good refining tech has been developed that makes it not be a bottleneck. I would be very excited to see a proposal that could work though and be proven wrong.
All of that being said there is way more hydropower that could be available, even if FERC just simplified the permitting process for run of river systems that have essentially zero (or positive in the case of existing dams that dont generate power [which is most of them]) environmental or safety impact, and really interesting and promising deep geothermal advancements being made. Particularly in the latter case, you could transition most of the grid to it if you could pull it off. I dont want to come off as someone who just wants to not advance or just burn coal all day or whatever, I just dont see how batteries could possibly work at the scale theyd be needed, much less the construction of the systems that would charge them.
You can charge your batteries with eg solar power, once that becomes cheap enough. The batteries don't have to be particularly energy dense, if they are just sitting around in a fixed location to help the grid. So you can use all kinds of technologies, not just the newest and shiniest we use for phones and electric cars.
Specifically, you can also use old cells from old phones and old cars. Even if they only hold have the charge that they used to hold, that's still fine for stationary applications. But I have no clue whether we are 'producing' enough old batteries to make a dent here.
Btw, you don't need to burn coal. While you are transitioning, you might want to keep burning natural gas instead? (But it doesn't impact the discussion very much.)
I don't know whether we can build enough batteries cheaply enough to make the proposed transition worthwhile. But fortunately, the economics work in our favour for getting started: the fewer batteries there are hooked up to the grid, the more their capacity to smooth load will be valued. So at the beginning they can compete with peaker plants, rather than having to compete with baseload.
We are sitting on a huge pile of matter, we have lots of stuff from the periodic table.
Specifically, many items in the periodic table are rarer than we would like. But human ingenuity usually finds a way around a shortage (even at a slightly higher price point.)
You already bring up substituting aluminium for copper. There are countless other examples.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by electrifying the UK? As far as I know, the UK has an electric grid covering the whole country?
The big question is about opportunity costs and whether things are worth it. Not so much whether they are feasible (assuming you have a sufficiently flexible goals, that doesn't insist on a specific material or technique).
Transitioning the UK from burning fossil fuels to burning no fossil fuels yet doing roughly all the same things that fossil fuels are letting them do currently. You can do some substitutions, but you can’t substitute everything. There’s plenty of matter but not in sufficient concentration to do what we need to to do that, since there is also the calculation of the amount of energy needed to get the stuff we need. So, if youre mining copper ore with a concentration of 1% and you need 20x more of it, you’ll have to mine a lot of ores that have 0.2% concentrations. That’s going to take a lot of diesel. Doing the mining with battery powered trucks and heavy equipment is wildly uneconomic. Not just kinda uneconomic, but staggeringly uneconomic. You can do it burning ammonia, which is probably what we’re going to next, but that itself takes a staggering amount of natural gas to make.
Transport is one of the easier things to electrify. Especially mining trucks, since you can know all the scheduled trips in the mines ahead of time; there are no surprises, like with a private car.
It would be, but only in places that are actually capable of building nuclear power plants. I don't think the US or most of Europe are in that club at the moment, thanks to adverse public opinion and regulations.
The most favorable argument for the EO’s stupidity on renewables is that it’s necessary to bring Dems to the table for permitting reform legislation. I haven’t seen that argument made from anyone who matters, but it seems plausible.
Time and again Richard posits bigotry and pettiness and racism as motives for the issues of immigration, here again with the birthright question. But this system has been gamed for a long time by illegals. In the case of legal, visiting, immigrants who are pregnant, if their motives are pure, why would they care if their babies weren't conferred American citizenship upon their birth? You can call it over-compensation, but imputing racism to it remains an unsubstantiated posit.
See my other comment in the main thread for why legal "visitors" would care about their kids not getting citizenship. At the very least, exceptions should be carved out for people who are in the US legally and are on a pathway toward getting permanent residency (the various work visas like H-1B and L-1 fall into this category).
Wrong answer. All adults are not treated the same here. Some get citizenship in 5 years, others take 25, despite both starting at the same line at the same time and possessing the same qualities, except for nationality.
At this point, they get not more than 7% of the slots, despite their populations being ~18% each of the world.
Different countries are not fungible with each other. Here are some thought experiments.
If all the white people of European countries decided to join their countries into a single mega-country, then that "Whiteland" would have a huge population too. But under American law, that entire region would then not get more than 7% of the green card slots in any year, just like India and China. Currently, because they are split into so many countries, they can collectively get way more green cards.
Likewise, if either India or China decided to split into, say, 30 countries each, their total number of green cards would be way more than what they are getting now. And there would be no green card queues for "Indians", nor would there be any concern that their US-born kids wouldn't be citizens.
White frankly, I don’t care if Indians “only” get 7% while being 18% of the world population. Its not man’s tot be alloted exactly on a per world percentage population. There are too many other characteristics that are important and applicable.
I’m looking at a U.S. government webpage on 2019 HB-1 visas by you they and the petitions are r by leaps and bounds are Indians.
You’re presenting a non-scenario that’s totally irrelevant. If India wants more Indians to immigrate to America on the Hb-1 visa, they are free to split up their country to do that. Until they do that, who cares?
Well, what would actually be nice is to give the visitors a choice. Not everyone wants automatic American citizenship, just because they baby accidentally gets born on a visit to the US. (Normally delivering a baby is quite predictable, but sometimes they come early, and sometimes you can't leave the country as planned, eg because a pandemic is on or for some other disruption to travel.)
Thanks to their inane tax system, American citizenship comes with a lot of downsides for those not living in the US. Like having to file and pay American taxes.
As a race realist and former racist himself Richard needs to punch right every now and again. That's all this is.
You don't have to agree with the right wing position on this, but you can understand their concerns about fairness , sovereignty and so on.
Unlike some people, Hanania isn't actually dumb enough or sheltered enough to not understand this. He speaks to right wingers. He's choosing to be maximally uncharitable.
Do not accuse me of “punching right” to make up for racism. I will ban for that. I believe that conservatives are bad people for thinking mass migration to the United States is a problem, and I’ve made that clear.
It has also been gamed by wealthy foreigners who are in the country legally at the time. It is very common among wealthy Japanese for instance to take a trip to Hawaii or California eight months into their pregnancy and thus give their child the advantage of holding dual citizenship. Japanese law technically forbids dual citizenship but this in practice is not enforced until people are adults and have graduated and established themselves in one country or the other.
You could argue this system brings in human capital to the country but it also clearly cheapens the value of American citizenship and reduces social cohesion. It also obviously perversely incentivizes illegal immigration as you stated. I don't really see how opposing this clearly outdated system is cruel or motivated by bigotry. Granted, the left uses the argument that much of the constitution is outdated to promote their own agenda so Republicans ought to walk a fine line on this subject.
Why wouldn’t we want more of those? Particularly if they’re generally increasing the absolute standard of living for almost everyone.
Is the issue some relative status ranking? E.g., that some people would rather be in the top 10% of a horrible world than the bottom 10% of an amazing one. If so, I can’t imagine why any society would want people with that mindset. At most, we can offer everyone an opportunity to keep working on improving their ranking in a generally gradual process. Few, if any, would want rapid changes in relative status, and moreover, you can’t offer that as a system grows in complexity. You basically need quantum-scale precision, like nanometers, for that to work.
Do you mean why wouldn't we want more wealthy dual citizens or more people from the third world attempting to reach the US to have an anchor baby? I really don't understand the point you are making. Some of these people work on improving their status gradually, others do not and consume an inordinate amount of public resources to be processed, transported, and housed. This is clearly inferior to a system that awards citizenship based on some merit-based metric that doesn't punish legal immigration and incentivize illegal immigration.
There is a recurring cycle (approximately 80 years in length) in American history where social progress in terms of civil rights increases, at the end of which the door is slammed shut and further changes are blocked until the next cycle. From the 1860s until the 1940s, there were many strides in Black civil rights and women's rights--incremental and gradual--however, if those changes weren't "locked in" by the 1940s, they had to wait for the next cycle--such as getting rid of "separate but equal", which was the "progress" from the last cycle. The current 1940s cycle is just now coming to an end.
Imagine a "sawtooth" function where progress starts from a zero point, and increases roughly linearly until hitting a stop where progress halts.
If you're familiar with Strauss & Howe this will make sense to you.
I think that cisgender LGB rights have gotten "locked in"--we won't see any going backwards on same-sex marriage or sexual orientation discrimination law, to name a couple. There will be noise but no real change. We in society have fully digested LGB rights.
Transgender rights, OTOH, will see regression and any further progress will have to start anew in the next cycle. Society has not locked in trans rights.
If there's a reason for this, I think that society needs the pause to take stock and digest the changes made to this point, and address the excesses that have emerged and deal with those questions (transitioning kids, transwomen in women's sports, etc.).
I'm confused by your history of black civil rights here, black Americans gained immense civil rights between the end of the civil war and the end of U.S. Grant's presidency, and then lost countless rights in half the country with only incremental progress until the 1950s, when they gained significant rights again. Since then we've seen a steady progress towards a more racially equal nation (all things considered).
"Generations" are nonsense. Age is a continuous variable. I don't see any reason to believe in such "cycles" rather than the sort of random walk one might see in the stock market.
I agree on gay rights, Gorsuch is treating them as flowing from originalism. But, then, he has used the same logic in favor of trans rights (even if they're not all the same rights trans activists might want).
RFK jr has been campaigning against offshore wind for years because a propsed scheme is an eyesore near the Kennedy compound. This might well be a petty move that shows his influence on the Trump administration.
Wind turbines are probably quite bad for whales and grid stability and more dubiously possibly bad for birds.
Hopefully, solar continues to become cheaper and cheaper. It seems to be on the semiconductor cost curve, so prices are likely to keep dropping.
At some point, solar panels will be effectively free, so the limiting factor will be land (and perhaps the cost of installing them and the grid).
There's probably a way to make floating solar panels (even if at reduced efficiency perhaps), so once opportunity costs for land use start really limiting further expansion of solar capacity, we can start using the open oceans. They are barely used at all. Most of their space is effectively desert, with not even much in the way of biology happening.
"Imagine being here pregnant on a student visa, with a baby due in two months, and the president suddenly declares your child will not be a US citizen."
This is far from the biggest travesty one can imagine with this EO. Someone on a student visa is technically supposed to go back after the conclusion of their studies and is explicitly barred from applying for immigration.
But people on work visas like the H-1B (popularly misunderstood to be "temporary" or "non-immigrant"), who have decided to immigrate and have applied for green cards, could be waiting in line for decades before the US government is willing to give them that option, because most of these people are Indians and there is a very limited annual quota (not pro-rated by a country's share of population in the world) on the citizens of any given country. This policy assumes that a country is a country is a country, whether it be Liechtenstein or Spain or Russia or India, despite the orders of magnitude differences in their respective demographics.
In such cases, there are people who are legally in the US for ages, have forgotten what their home country is like, but whose US-born children will have to compulsorily leave the US when they turn 18.
Overall a total rightoid victory for the time being and far more total than even I was expecting; in particular, I thought that the Tech Right had won the skilled immigration debate. I guess not. Jail for me!
Labeling the cartels as terrorists (they are obviously very nasty people but they are not terrorists under any reasonable definition of the term) might be setting up grounds for military intervention in Mexico as well as to provide fake talking points about the "terrorist threat" south of the border in order to further demonize undocumented immigrants. Truly ghastly and disturbing developments.
While violent J6 insurrectionists go free I note that the libertarian/cypherpunk hero Ross Ulbricht remains in jail.
As I was mostly expecting, aid to Ukraine continues unabated. Jail programmed for Monke.
It's perfectly justifiable for Biden to pardon Fauci, Milley, and TBH even his own family members in light of Trump's oft-stated intention to weaponize the legal system against his enemies.
I suppose one bright (if expected) spot is that there was no discernible move on abortion and the other really hardcore culture war stuff in Project 2025. Though it's the first days so who knows. Regardless, at this point looks like the best case scenario is for Trumpism to remain its crony oligarchic self up to 2028, without going deep into "funny" ideological territory.
> It's perfectly justifiable for Biden to pardon Fauci, Milley, and TBH even his own family members in light of Trump's oft-stated intention to weaponize the legal system against his enemies.
But Trump campaigned in 2016 on "lock her [Hillary] up!". One of those campaign promises he never fulfilled. No reason to think things would be different this time.
I hear you, but Trump’s first term actually involved a lot of adherence to norms and listening to establishment GOP figures. Every indication is that he won’t be so restrained this time around. Also, didn’t Sessions’s time as AG end because he refused to do a political prosecution at Trump’s urging?
I'm not very sympathetic to the J6 rioters generally, but I was trying to find a clear and not vague summary of exactly what Enrique Tarrio was accused of doing and could not. The man got decades in jail.
OPM released their guidance on the Hiring Freeze, and it’s extensive. Check USAJOBS in the morning, and I’ll bet it’ll be barren. We were ordered to pull all job offers and announcements by 5:00pm today, and if we want an exemption, apply to OPM later.
> It’s one thing to be cruel to say criminals, or even ideological opponents, but it says something awful about one’s character to relish in cruelty towards those who have done you no wrong
Which criminals have done me wrong, personally? Furthermore, people in the country illegally are "criminals" in the literal sense of violating the law, even if you think the law should be different. At any rate, I don't see how Trump's executive order can override SCOTUS decisions on birthright citizenship which go back to the 19th century.
> your citizenship is like a membership card you have to hoard lest it lose its value
Well, if the illegal entrant's sole offense is it enter the country illegally, they have technically done no one any wrong, unlike other kinds of criminals whose victims can be pinpointed. Even somebody caught speeding is potentially more harmful to people as they might have caused an accident because of their actions. Just being within the borders of a country, albeit without that country's permission, is weak tea compared to anything else.
I'm curious how you think the courts can uphold the revocation of birthright citizenship, even if they want to. The whole argument depends on claiming that illegal immigrants and temporary visitors are not subject to the the jurisdiction of the United States, but that would classify them the same as another group that currently isn't subject to jurisdiction: diplomats. That is, if those people are not subject to our jurisdiction, they can't be prosecuted for crimes they commit, can't be required to pay taxes, etc.
I don't think anyone will accept that, left or right, which means that to make this stick the courts are going to have to slice "jurisdiction" into at least two pieces, the one that says you can be prosecuted and required to pay taxes and the one that says your children are citizens, then having created these subcategories of jurisdiction they'll need to argue that only the latter one is relevant to the 14A, which will be a circular argument unless the "children are citizens" part of jurisdiction is something more than just that, some classification that has some natural reason to exist but happens to include the "children are citizens" element of jurisdiction.
That seems impossible to me, unless the courts just abandon logic and adherence to the text of the constitution entirely.
I mean, courts can do whatever they want. Entire doctrines and canons aren’t based in text. I agree that they would not accept the lousy argument on birthright citizenship, but the court is bounded only by the shamelessness of its members, which has been increasing over the last 15 years or so.
Great column. If you have a low tolerance for pedantry, stop reading, but just fyi: while I don’t think there was any confusion over what you meant, ‘black box’ is slightly misused above. It’s not merely an unknown thing. It’s more like something that performs a known or predictable function, but its the inner workings are unknown. (No relation to the thing on airplanes)
It seems to me that you're somewhat downplaying the extent to which Trump is trying to undermine renewable energy.
He's not downplaying it, he's acknowledging it and saying he doesn't care. Because until the left adopts the abundance agenda and repudiates degrowth, global warming solutions need to fall by the wayside.
He is downplaying it.
> A third order ends offshore leasing for wind energy until further notice. It also stops and mandates a review of all wind leasing and permitting practices. I don’t know enough about this topic to understand whether this is good or bad. It isn’t necessarily anti-abundance if the federal government has been unjustifiably prioritizing wind as an inefficient source of energy.
"This looks bad, but here's a reason why it *might* not be bad, which I'm not going to look into further for fear of proving myself wrong."
The renewable energy that matters is solar, not wind. I didn't see anything about solar, one way or the other.
My guess is that it's bad, but I'm also not going to bother looking into it.
> Regarding the section “Symbolic Nonsense” above, I think that there is perhaps something serious here worth thinking about, which is that the left used to get its way on language, and this contributed to an all-pervasive feeling that they were in control. Pronouns sort of work like this, along with consistently coming up with new phrases like BIPOC. When conservatives do things such as rename the Gulf of Mexico and eliminate all uses of the word “gender” in the federal government, that can have a subtle but nonetheless real effect on culture.
I don't think this will work. The power of woke language changes came from its grassroots nature and philosophical backing; everyone around you was telling you you had to say different things, everyone afraid of being jumped on if they didn't join in, and you couldn't just say "I don't wanna" because there were a litany of laborious-to-debunk reasons why this made you a bad person.
A ham-handed top-down proclamation doesn't have nearly the same power. Your average Joe can just go on calling it the Gulf of Mexico and suffer no consequences. If anything I think this just makes MAGA look sad and pathetic; unable to wield power in ways that matter, so they resort to naming random geological features after themselves, which everyone else ignores.
The top-down proclamation has an effect though because millions of conservatives will go along and create certain pressure. Trump isn’t standing on an island here issuing proclamations, he represents one of the two political tribes. Also woke language down to the way we classify race in some cases actually was top down, see my book for details.
Pronouns was top-down and enforced through stigma and social and economic punishment.
I had a wine friend turn against her progressive friends after she was repeatedly attacked for accidentally using the wrong pronouns. She was trying but apparently not hard enough. It’s hard to keep saying she to a 200 pound man with lipstick in a mini skirt.
Sad and pathetic is believing men belong in women’s prisons because feelings. Also dangerous and anti-woman.
On immigration: "cruelty" is often necessary when others use empathy to manipulate you. Nationalists claim ownership of their nation and the right to protect what is theirs.
Exactly.
Imagine thinking that being in the US on a non immigrant temporary visa and giving birth in the U.S. means your child had automatic citizenship. Pure entitlement!
No American on a student visa in France can pop out a baby and demand and expect citizenship.
Would love Richard to go after all the cruel bigoted Western nations that deny their this right to foreign nationals.
Don't think you understand your own US immigration system. Nobody gets an immigrant visa (i.e., green card) directly on their own merits. One way is to be related to a US citizen, and then get on a queue. The other way is to obtain one of the many "temporary" work visas (H-1B being just one example) and then apply for a green card, and then get on a queue. That's it. Being a student doesn't qualify (the US govt explicitly asks you to make a commitment to return to your home country after graduation), so I can understand if their kids are excluded from this (even though it may be tough for a student who hopes to get a work visa after graduation.)
> (the US govt explicitly asks you to make a commitment to return to your home country after graduation), so I can understand if their kids are excluded from this
So the parents come the the USA and have a child while they are freshmen and then go home to India 3 years later and leave their 3 year old in the USA. And you "can understand" that
You have reading comprehension issues. I explicitly excluded students and included "guest" workers when I argued for retaining birthright citizenship for kids.
Guest workers are here for 3 years and h1b student for 6. Why should children that young stay in the country after their parents leave?
Ok, let me spell it out. The law allows H-1B visa holders to apply for a green card via their employers. While the green card application is pending, the visa holder’s H-1B visa can continue to be extended for an indefinite amount of time following the 3 or 6 year period, as the case may be. For almost all nationalities other than India or China or Mexico or Philippines, there is no meed for a single extension as they get green cards approved within 3 or so years. But because of a per country annual cap on green cards, workers from heavily populated countries like India get on a queue that increases in length every year. Where a worker from Portugal or Malaysia or Somalia can get a green card in 3 years, an Indian co-worker doing a similar job may have to wait decades literally.
This is one thing in which the Old World and the New World meaningfully differ.
The Old World is almost all Ius Sanguinus, the New World almost entirely Ius Soli
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/nn7evq/places_where_birthright_citizenship_is_based_on/#lightbox
Ok but change is possible and the Old World rule makes sense here.
Also besides Canada, what country is the new world gets massive illegal migrants?
I’d love to see numbers of illegal migration to Canada. If they got a tenth of what the U.S. receives, they’d eliminate it.
Scott Alexander is good on niceness:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/02/be-nice-at-least-until-you-can-coordinate-meanness/
That's pretty stupid.
You aren't protecting anything. You are keeping your fellow countrymen from voluntarily hiring who they want to hire, or from voluntarily renting out their properties.
No one suggests that migrants should be allowed to take your stuff.
Do you really not know the nationalist case? Do you think we are talking about stealing bikes? No we are talking about the problems of mass migration stealing opportunity costs by having to focus on those issues (DEI is an example, look at how much was given to black and brown people in a zero sum manner)
I think there is a missing point about imo the biggest world impacting event. The designation of cartels as terrorist entities and how it might turn into a proxy war on the backyard of America.
Trump pumping a shitcoin flew under the radar but I really think that it’s so despicable I would have no issue with impeachment. And I enthusiastically voted for him.
Did Trump give speeches as Goldman Sachs? Or are you referring to different office holders?
Political favors doled out to oil corporations -- wow, what an exciting new age! So different than the previous 100 years of GOP policy.
But seriously, does Trump actually not realize that the US is the Saudi Arabia of wind and solar? And that these technologies will lead to energy independence without relying on a dwindling, obsolete, dirty 19th-century technology? And that the renewable energy industry is poised to usher in a new Industrial Revolution that will massively benefit US workers and the economy?
Or, we can just let China rake in those trillions.... Because it's fun to troll the libs, amirite?
While I'm all in on Trump's anti-woke and immigration EOs, his energy policy reveals himself to be yet another in a long line of fossil fuel industry arse-kissers... Pathetic.
How to provide baseload power with wind and solar commiserate with the pace it has been being put in lately?
Batteries and load shaping.
I have no opinion on whether that's the best option, specifically whether it's better than using other forms of power and no batteries. But it's entirely feasible to use batteries.
Batteries are so good these days at holding charge, you can even use them for seasonal storage.
(By load shaping I mean eg contracts with consumers, especially industrial consumers, that give them very cheap power in general if they agree to be shut off when spot prices go up too much.)
As far as I know, unless we get the hydrogen sulfide tech or some other waaay cheaper battery technology system going, we dont have the minerals to do that. And by that I mean just in the world, being mined. There isnt enough just copper, for instance, to electrify just the UK. Could replace it with aluminum for a lot of things, but my point is that even just generous back of the napkin math cant get there. To say nothing of the amount of coal needed for polysilicate production and carbon fiber, or cobalt. Nickel has largely been solved which is cool (current production cant meet it but some good refining tech has been developed that makes it not be a bottleneck. I would be very excited to see a proposal that could work though and be proven wrong.
All of that being said there is way more hydropower that could be available, even if FERC just simplified the permitting process for run of river systems that have essentially zero (or positive in the case of existing dams that dont generate power [which is most of them]) environmental or safety impact, and really interesting and promising deep geothermal advancements being made. Particularly in the latter case, you could transition most of the grid to it if you could pull it off. I dont want to come off as someone who just wants to not advance or just burn coal all day or whatever, I just dont see how batteries could possibly work at the scale theyd be needed, much less the construction of the systems that would charge them.
You can charge your batteries with eg solar power, once that becomes cheap enough. The batteries don't have to be particularly energy dense, if they are just sitting around in a fixed location to help the grid. So you can use all kinds of technologies, not just the newest and shiniest we use for phones and electric cars.
Specifically, you can also use old cells from old phones and old cars. Even if they only hold have the charge that they used to hold, that's still fine for stationary applications. But I have no clue whether we are 'producing' enough old batteries to make a dent here.
Btw, you don't need to burn coal. While you are transitioning, you might want to keep burning natural gas instead? (But it doesn't impact the discussion very much.)
I don't know whether we can build enough batteries cheaply enough to make the proposed transition worthwhile. But fortunately, the economics work in our favour for getting started: the fewer batteries there are hooked up to the grid, the more their capacity to smooth load will be valued. So at the beginning they can compete with peaker plants, rather than having to compete with baseload.
Like it isnt a matter of will or expense, it is a matter of things from the periodic table not being available in the amounts we would need.
We are sitting on a huge pile of matter, we have lots of stuff from the periodic table.
Specifically, many items in the periodic table are rarer than we would like. But human ingenuity usually finds a way around a shortage (even at a slightly higher price point.)
You already bring up substituting aluminium for copper. There are countless other examples.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by electrifying the UK? As far as I know, the UK has an electric grid covering the whole country?
The big question is about opportunity costs and whether things are worth it. Not so much whether they are feasible (assuming you have a sufficiently flexible goals, that doesn't insist on a specific material or technique).
Transitioning the UK from burning fossil fuels to burning no fossil fuels yet doing roughly all the same things that fossil fuels are letting them do currently. You can do some substitutions, but you can’t substitute everything. There’s plenty of matter but not in sufficient concentration to do what we need to to do that, since there is also the calculation of the amount of energy needed to get the stuff we need. So, if youre mining copper ore with a concentration of 1% and you need 20x more of it, you’ll have to mine a lot of ores that have 0.2% concentrations. That’s going to take a lot of diesel. Doing the mining with battery powered trucks and heavy equipment is wildly uneconomic. Not just kinda uneconomic, but staggeringly uneconomic. You can do it burning ammonia, which is probably what we’re going to next, but that itself takes a staggering amount of natural gas to make.
The UK doesn't do much copper mining, does it?
Transport is one of the easier things to electrify. Especially mining trucks, since you can know all the scheduled trips in the mines ahead of time; there are no surprises, like with a private car.
Nuclear is the clear solution to supplement other renewables
It would be, but only in places that are actually capable of building nuclear power plants. I don't think the US or most of Europe are in that club at the moment, thanks to adverse public opinion and regulations.
The most favorable argument for the EO’s stupidity on renewables is that it’s necessary to bring Dems to the table for permitting reform legislation. I haven’t seen that argument made from anyone who matters, but it seems plausible.
Time and again Richard posits bigotry and pettiness and racism as motives for the issues of immigration, here again with the birthright question. But this system has been gamed for a long time by illegals. In the case of legal, visiting, immigrants who are pregnant, if their motives are pure, why would they care if their babies weren't conferred American citizenship upon their birth? You can call it over-compensation, but imputing racism to it remains an unsubstantiated posit.
It’s very disappointing of him especially after the Michael Lind hit piece where he labeled Hanania a horrible racist white supremacist.
See my other comment in the main thread for why legal "visitors" would care about their kids not getting citizenship. At the very least, exceptions should be carved out for people who are in the US legally and are on a pathway toward getting permanent residency (the various work visas like H-1B and L-1 fall into this category).
No exceptions. Once those adults get citizenship themselves, then they can get it for their kids.
Wrong answer. All adults are not treated the same here. Some get citizenship in 5 years, others take 25, despite both starting at the same line at the same time and possessing the same qualities, except for nationality.
Spouse of a citizenship is not the same as an Hb-1 visa holder seeking to adjust status to LPR. They are different and should be treated differently.
We live under the nation-state system and so treating individuals as citizens of other nation-states is perfectly acceptable, legal and ethical.
No reason why India and China get to hog all the spots ll because their populations are enormous.
At this point, they get not more than 7% of the slots, despite their populations being ~18% each of the world.
Different countries are not fungible with each other. Here are some thought experiments.
If all the white people of European countries decided to join their countries into a single mega-country, then that "Whiteland" would have a huge population too. But under American law, that entire region would then not get more than 7% of the green card slots in any year, just like India and China. Currently, because they are split into so many countries, they can collectively get way more green cards.
Likewise, if either India or China decided to split into, say, 30 countries each, their total number of green cards would be way more than what they are getting now. And there would be no green card queues for "Indians", nor would there be any concern that their US-born kids wouldn't be citizens.
Use of Whiteland shows your prejudices.
White frankly, I don’t care if Indians “only” get 7% while being 18% of the world population. Its not man’s tot be alloted exactly on a per world percentage population. There are too many other characteristics that are important and applicable.
I’m looking at a U.S. government webpage on 2019 HB-1 visas by you they and the petitions are r by leaps and bounds are Indians.
You’re presenting a non-scenario that’s totally irrelevant. If India wants more Indians to immigrate to America on the Hb-1 visa, they are free to split up their country to do that. Until they do that, who cares?
Well, what would actually be nice is to give the visitors a choice. Not everyone wants automatic American citizenship, just because they baby accidentally gets born on a visit to the US. (Normally delivering a baby is quite predictable, but sometimes they come early, and sometimes you can't leave the country as planned, eg because a pandemic is on or for some other disruption to travel.)
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidental_American
Thanks to their inane tax system, American citizenship comes with a lot of downsides for those not living in the US. Like having to file and pay American taxes.
As a race realist and former racist himself Richard needs to punch right every now and again. That's all this is.
You don't have to agree with the right wing position on this, but you can understand their concerns about fairness , sovereignty and so on.
Unlike some people, Hanania isn't actually dumb enough or sheltered enough to not understand this. He speaks to right wingers. He's choosing to be maximally uncharitable.
Do not accuse me of “punching right” to make up for racism. I will ban for that. I believe that conservatives are bad people for thinking mass migration to the United States is a problem, and I’ve made that clear.
It has also been gamed by wealthy foreigners who are in the country legally at the time. It is very common among wealthy Japanese for instance to take a trip to Hawaii or California eight months into their pregnancy and thus give their child the advantage of holding dual citizenship. Japanese law technically forbids dual citizenship but this in practice is not enforced until people are adults and have graduated and established themselves in one country or the other.
You could argue this system brings in human capital to the country but it also clearly cheapens the value of American citizenship and reduces social cohesion. It also obviously perversely incentivizes illegal immigration as you stated. I don't really see how opposing this clearly outdated system is cruel or motivated by bigotry. Granted, the left uses the argument that much of the constitution is outdated to promote their own agenda so Republicans ought to walk a fine line on this subject.
Why wouldn’t we want more of those? Particularly if they’re generally increasing the absolute standard of living for almost everyone.
Is the issue some relative status ranking? E.g., that some people would rather be in the top 10% of a horrible world than the bottom 10% of an amazing one. If so, I can’t imagine why any society would want people with that mindset. At most, we can offer everyone an opportunity to keep working on improving their ranking in a generally gradual process. Few, if any, would want rapid changes in relative status, and moreover, you can’t offer that as a system grows in complexity. You basically need quantum-scale precision, like nanometers, for that to work.
Do you mean why wouldn't we want more wealthy dual citizens or more people from the third world attempting to reach the US to have an anchor baby? I really don't understand the point you are making. Some of these people work on improving their status gradually, others do not and consume an inordinate amount of public resources to be processed, transported, and housed. This is clearly inferior to a system that awards citizenship based on some merit-based metric that doesn't punish legal immigration and incentivize illegal immigration.
There is a recurring cycle (approximately 80 years in length) in American history where social progress in terms of civil rights increases, at the end of which the door is slammed shut and further changes are blocked until the next cycle. From the 1860s until the 1940s, there were many strides in Black civil rights and women's rights--incremental and gradual--however, if those changes weren't "locked in" by the 1940s, they had to wait for the next cycle--such as getting rid of "separate but equal", which was the "progress" from the last cycle. The current 1940s cycle is just now coming to an end.
Imagine a "sawtooth" function where progress starts from a zero point, and increases roughly linearly until hitting a stop where progress halts.
If you're familiar with Strauss & Howe this will make sense to you.
I think that cisgender LGB rights have gotten "locked in"--we won't see any going backwards on same-sex marriage or sexual orientation discrimination law, to name a couple. There will be noise but no real change. We in society have fully digested LGB rights.
Transgender rights, OTOH, will see regression and any further progress will have to start anew in the next cycle. Society has not locked in trans rights.
If there's a reason for this, I think that society needs the pause to take stock and digest the changes made to this point, and address the excesses that have emerged and deal with those questions (transitioning kids, transwomen in women's sports, etc.).
I'm confused by your history of black civil rights here, black Americans gained immense civil rights between the end of the civil war and the end of U.S. Grant's presidency, and then lost countless rights in half the country with only incremental progress until the 1950s, when they gained significant rights again. Since then we've seen a steady progress towards a more racially equal nation (all things considered).
"Generations" are nonsense. Age is a continuous variable. I don't see any reason to believe in such "cycles" rather than the sort of random walk one might see in the stock market.
I agree on gay rights, Gorsuch is treating them as flowing from originalism. But, then, he has used the same logic in favor of trans rights (even if they're not all the same rights trans activists might want).
Damn women and their right to vote.
RFK jr has been campaigning against offshore wind for years because a propsed scheme is an eyesore near the Kennedy compound. This might well be a petty move that shows his influence on the Trump administration.
Wind turbines are probably quite bad for whales and grid stability and more dubiously possibly bad for birds.
Trump had his own issue with windfarms in view of a golf course he owns (owned?) in Ireland, IIRC
Who cares about whales? We dont even care about humans evidently Trump wants to continue coal which is extremely bad for us
Hopefully, solar continues to become cheaper and cheaper. It seems to be on the semiconductor cost curve, so prices are likely to keep dropping.
At some point, solar panels will be effectively free, so the limiting factor will be land (and perhaps the cost of installing them and the grid).
There's probably a way to make floating solar panels (even if at reduced efficiency perhaps), so once opportunity costs for land use start really limiting further expansion of solar capacity, we can start using the open oceans. They are barely used at all. Most of their space is effectively desert, with not even much in the way of biology happening.
Will that be reversed when/if RFK gets fired?
"Imagine being here pregnant on a student visa, with a baby due in two months, and the president suddenly declares your child will not be a US citizen."
This is far from the biggest travesty one can imagine with this EO. Someone on a student visa is technically supposed to go back after the conclusion of their studies and is explicitly barred from applying for immigration.
But people on work visas like the H-1B (popularly misunderstood to be "temporary" or "non-immigrant"), who have decided to immigrate and have applied for green cards, could be waiting in line for decades before the US government is willing to give them that option, because most of these people are Indians and there is a very limited annual quota (not pro-rated by a country's share of population in the world) on the citizens of any given country. This policy assumes that a country is a country is a country, whether it be Liechtenstein or Spain or Russia or India, despite the orders of magnitude differences in their respective demographics.
In such cases, there are people who are legally in the US for ages, have forgotten what their home country is like, but whose US-born children will have to compulsorily leave the US when they turn 18.
Overall a total rightoid victory for the time being and far more total than even I was expecting; in particular, I thought that the Tech Right had won the skilled immigration debate. I guess not. Jail for me!
Labeling the cartels as terrorists (they are obviously very nasty people but they are not terrorists under any reasonable definition of the term) might be setting up grounds for military intervention in Mexico as well as to provide fake talking points about the "terrorist threat" south of the border in order to further demonize undocumented immigrants. Truly ghastly and disturbing developments.
While violent J6 insurrectionists go free I note that the libertarian/cypherpunk hero Ross Ulbricht remains in jail.
As I was mostly expecting, aid to Ukraine continues unabated. Jail programmed for Monke.
It's perfectly justifiable for Biden to pardon Fauci, Milley, and TBH even his own family members in light of Trump's oft-stated intention to weaponize the legal system against his enemies.
I suppose one bright (if expected) spot is that there was no discernible move on abortion and the other really hardcore culture war stuff in Project 2025. Though it's the first days so who knows. Regardless, at this point looks like the best case scenario is for Trumpism to remain its crony oligarchic self up to 2028, without going deep into "funny" ideological territory.
Credit where it's due: Trump has pardoned the very unjustly imprisoned Ross Ulbricht. https://x.com/powerfultakes/status/1881860457746837704
> It's perfectly justifiable for Biden to pardon Fauci, Milley, and TBH even his own family members in light of Trump's oft-stated intention to weaponize the legal system against his enemies.
But Trump campaigned in 2016 on "lock her [Hillary] up!". One of those campaign promises he never fulfilled. No reason to think things would be different this time.
I hear you, but Trump’s first term actually involved a lot of adherence to norms and listening to establishment GOP figures. Every indication is that he won’t be so restrained this time around. Also, didn’t Sessions’s time as AG end because he refused to do a political prosecution at Trump’s urging?
There was a lot of turnover in his administration. I don't think that settled over time.
You underestimate the resistance to illegal migration by ordinary Americans. To be expected of those who live in bubbles.
It's weird. Ordinary Americans resist migration at the ballot box. But they are happy to employ them or rent to them.
Compare https://mises.org/journal-libertarian-studies/prejudice-free-discrimination-has-costs
Next time I get a bagel and coffee I’ll make sure to ask the cashier for her work authorization.
Or when a tenant wants to rent my apartment, I’ll ask for their immigration status, even though it’s illegal to do so in my state.
This problem requires a national enforcement, not individual actions.
I'm not very sympathetic to the J6 rioters generally, but I was trying to find a clear and not vague summary of exactly what Enrique Tarrio was accused of doing and could not. The man got decades in jail.
Did you try googling “Enrique Tarrio seditious conspiracy?”
Better yet, you could actually link the webpage you're referring to.
OPM released their guidance on the Hiring Freeze, and it’s extensive. Check USAJOBS in the morning, and I’ll bet it’ll be barren. We were ordered to pull all job offers and announcements by 5:00pm today, and if we want an exemption, apply to OPM later.
> It’s one thing to be cruel to say criminals, or even ideological opponents, but it says something awful about one’s character to relish in cruelty towards those who have done you no wrong
Which criminals have done me wrong, personally? Furthermore, people in the country illegally are "criminals" in the literal sense of violating the law, even if you think the law should be different. At any rate, I don't see how Trump's executive order can override SCOTUS decisions on birthright citizenship which go back to the 19th century.
> your citizenship is like a membership card you have to hoard lest it lose its value
It actually would work that way if we could sell our citizenship: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/transferable-citizenshiphtml
> Today, right-wing judges are influenced by the same intellectual currents as other conservatives.
Republican-appointed judges on SCOTUS specifically have ruled against Trump multiple times.
Well, if the illegal entrant's sole offense is it enter the country illegally, they have technically done no one any wrong, unlike other kinds of criminals whose victims can be pinpointed. Even somebody caught speeding is potentially more harmful to people as they might have caused an accident because of their actions. Just being within the borders of a country, albeit without that country's permission, is weak tea compared to anything else.
There's lots of other victimless crimes, too.
Potentially harming people is not actually harming people. Anyone might potentially harm someone.
Your child might one day harm you. Therefore you must not have kids.
I think that kind of logic would be purged by natural selection.
I'm curious how you think the courts can uphold the revocation of birthright citizenship, even if they want to. The whole argument depends on claiming that illegal immigrants and temporary visitors are not subject to the the jurisdiction of the United States, but that would classify them the same as another group that currently isn't subject to jurisdiction: diplomats. That is, if those people are not subject to our jurisdiction, they can't be prosecuted for crimes they commit, can't be required to pay taxes, etc.
I don't think anyone will accept that, left or right, which means that to make this stick the courts are going to have to slice "jurisdiction" into at least two pieces, the one that says you can be prosecuted and required to pay taxes and the one that says your children are citizens, then having created these subcategories of jurisdiction they'll need to argue that only the latter one is relevant to the 14A, which will be a circular argument unless the "children are citizens" part of jurisdiction is something more than just that, some classification that has some natural reason to exist but happens to include the "children are citizens" element of jurisdiction.
That seems impossible to me, unless the courts just abandon logic and adherence to the text of the constitution entirely.
I mean, courts can do whatever they want. Entire doctrines and canons aren’t based in text. I agree that they would not accept the lousy argument on birthright citizenship, but the court is bounded only by the shamelessness of its members, which has been increasing over the last 15 years or so.
Great column. If you have a low tolerance for pedantry, stop reading, but just fyi: while I don’t think there was any confusion over what you meant, ‘black box’ is slightly misused above. It’s not merely an unknown thing. It’s more like something that performs a known or predictable function, but its the inner workings are unknown. (No relation to the thing on airplanes)
Yeah, "unknown quantity" would have been preferable.