Canada has always accepted immigrants. Rapidly increasing the number of foreign students to goose the slumping post-secondary education sector did not work out great. Even with the reductions, there are always immigrants coming into Canada.
Both New Zealand and Australia have about 30% of the population born overseas. Immigration does lead to some stresses but it also has bonuses. Immigration seems to clearly help in the short term.
But yes, immigration doesn't solve the demographics issue, because immigrant citizens also get old and expect government support.
Immigrants do often have good sized families so that brings in a fresh generation of New Zealanders. Plenty of my married friends are from mixed cultures.
In some cultures their children give more time to care for their own parents or elderly family. New Zealand born children seem less likely to do so.
The local born often whine because whinging is a significant part of our colonial heritage from England.
The point is Malthus was very popular in his day and his predictions appeared iron clad, just like predictions about population collapse seem to be today. Many countries enacted population control programs due to his influence.
Reality often has a funny way of evading predictions.
This is the crux. Trump is simultaneously a wholesale departure from political norms, but also merely a culmination of decades of reactionary talk radio preaching "Death to America" but then backing it off just enough for people to go to the polls and vote for "their" candidate.
Trump's second term should be the end of the Republican party. But if Bush II is an indication, the pattern was that while people gradually came around to seeing what a bad idea the Iraq War was and whatnot, they merely cooled off for a few years but then were right back at it getting fooled again a slightly different way. How much of the support for Trump was basically recycled criticism of the Iraq War (ie of the Republican establishment) ? And yet here we are now, with a nice shiny new quagmire (assuming it isn't an outright loss).
fwiw I'm a libertarian so while I actually agree with much of the criticism, it galls me even more how people can start with very individual-liberty-centric criticisms, but then somehow gleefully jump behind supporting authoritarianism when it can be their turn at the trough.
I have regrets when I say something dumb or drive through an intersection on a not-quite-yellow light.
Innocent people, including children, are dead. Republicans have done irreparable harm to this country on every imaginable level: civil liberties, trade, global power, economics. Open and naked corruption is so off the charts it can only be described with comparisons to the post-Soviet era.
What exactly do they have deep regrets about, though? Do they regret voting for someone with his style? Do they regret empowering an obvious corrupt liar? Do they regret supporting someone who focuses on who to blame and hurt, rather than on things that might actually help (albeit in regrettably marginal ways in all three cases)?
Or do they just regret that they were fooled by this guy, specifically? That he's not accomplishing his stated goals, whether or not he is taking his promised actions? If it's this one, then it's only a matter of time before another charlatan does the same thing better.
Usually they regret him not being extreme enough. Being personally harmed to a very high level also works. The keyword is very high level, people are willing to take a lot of pain for someone they think is "jesus".
I don't disagree. The Democrats believed their "permanent Democratic majority" schtick, and enacted a bunch of things that much of the country deeply disagreed with.
But we also need a national reckoning on ICE's excessive use of force, DOGE, using the DOJ to prosecute political opponents, the financial irresponsibility of the "Big Beautiful Bill", the attack on the Capitol, the rest of the attempt to undermine the results of the 2020 elections, the tariffs by executive order, the threats to Canada and Greenland...
So sad to me how combative Apple has been towards open source software over the years. The peak of the jailbreak era was imo peak mobile development too. So much innovation and rapid iteration. Anything seemed possible and anything really was possible if you put your mind to it and built the thing. Pretty much any good idea apple integrated into ios has been shamelessly copied without attribute from that crucible of creativity that is the jailbreak community.
But it all hinged on someone coming up with an exploit and releasing it free to the community ignoring any bug bounty. True altruists. And apple is good enough at whack a mole and paying people $100k that this sort of effort died out. Most low hanging fruit all picked and patched already. It is no wonder that ios innovation has also stalled out now that there isn't someone to copy good ideas from any longer.
It sucks because for a while, at least in the second jobs era, they seemed to at least hesitantly support foss. They collaborated with KDE, released darwin as free software, and contributed to GCC and then very heavily to LLVM. MacOS, for a while, used an open source init system (systemstarter for a while, then launchd)
Which governments, though? The US loves these "NOBUS" companies, enforcing Google and Apple's walled garden is part of their agenda.
The hardline opposition like China, Russia and North Korea all have contingency ecosystems they'd rather promote than force Apple to comply with an arbitrary featureset. The EU, for all the good it has done, will have to contend with the US refusing to extend FVEY intelligence to states that resist cooperation.
The four other eyes are most likely already excluding the US at this point given that sharing intelligence with the US almost certainly means sharing it with your enemies.
I doubt that. Most of those governments still rely on US-made software and US-designed hardware, so the NSA's Sword of Damocles is always dangling over their head whether or not their cooperate. The Canadian Sikh murders seem to indicate a level of US-Canada intelligence cooperation that still operates well.
My original statement should have read Nine Eyes or Fourteen Eyes, but the point stands. The US can play hardball behind closed doors and make these nations regret regulation even if it's a good policy.
I'm sure "the government" (almighty, praised be it's name) is very interested in regulating an industry in order to supplicate your extremely niche hobby.
But faith can move mountains. Maybe you have to sacrifice some goats to the government to have your prayers heard?
I don't think you need to win this, you just need to not be near the bottom of the board. But just in case, I spam tokens like it's the Chuck E Cheese roulette game.
i think the best in this case is to be solidly in the middle of the pack. don't want to be near the bottom, don't want to be a tall poppy when the backlash comes
"California’s top foreign refinery supplier of gasoline and blendstocks this decade is Reliance Industries Ltd.’s Jamnagar refinery complex in western India. "
"More than 9 million barrels arrived via this loophole in 2025"
Now, that's a tiny fraction of the 320M barrels of gas used in CA annually, but anything that affects global oil shipments will be felt in California.
> [California] imports about 60% of its crude from overseas--up from 5% in the mid-1980s- about a third of which comes from the
Middle East. About 15% of the state's refined fuels are also imported, much of which depends on Middle East crude.
but it's a problem easily solved by just letting in more immigrants.
reply