John Oliver's Last Week Tonight

The important takeaway here is that John Oliver thinks that James Stewart was a bad actor.

Legal immigration

I don't know if he really gets into the actual complexity of the issue, but it is nice to have it all laid out sequentially like this, as well as hear Oliver talk about his personal experiences.

One thing I only learned a few months ago, and it made perfect sense once I heard it, but there is such a thing as investment immigration. You're a wealthy businessman in a foreign country, you put enough of your money into the US economy you can fast track your green card. Another way of putting it is buying your citizenship. Supposedly that leads to some issues where they put just enough money for a certain length of time to qualify, and then pull out of the project once that's done with, leading to a number of half-constructed hotels.

Soon France will ask for their statue back.

One of my fellow employees got in on a work visa and then applied for permanent residence. Great guy. Apparently, the company had to jump through a lot of hoops to prove that he's "uniquely qualified" to do his job, which strikes me as a bit unfair. It's like the state is hovering over your shoulder, muttering, "Couldn't you have hired an American to do that?"

Edited by Fighteer on Sep 16th 2019 at 6:42:56 AM

This is something I wish was getting talked about in the Democratic primary: in addition to abolishing ICE, candidates should be asked if they'd commit to massively streamlining the legal immigration system, with the goal of keeping nobody waiting longer than a year (and possibly no longer deporting people simply for entering illegally, but that's a separate issue).

To be perfectly honest, I don't think that's something that candidates should be talking about right now. Is it important? Yes. Does it personally affect me? Yes, I'd wager far more than most (I'm working on the legal immigration process for my pregnant wife and going to go through it again with her parents for the sake of child care).

However, it's something that runs a horrible risk of shooting the Dems in the foot by giving Republicans ammo in the general. Hint: those that don't like undocumented immigrants don't like legal immigrants either, especially since they're the ones who could actually be argued as taking Americans' jobs.

Yes, I know. "If we only talk about good things that won't piss off the GOP base, we'd have to stop talking entirely." But I don't think it's a hot-button issue enough for the Democratic base, thus not worth the risk for the reward.

And again, this is speaking as someone heavily invested in streamlining legal immigration.

But it is a big deal for Democrats. The atrocities and abuses perpetrated by Republicans against legal and illegal immigrants are big headlines and are generating enormous anger. Capitalizing on that anger is a great way to get voters to the polls. Conversely, ignoring that anger is a great way to get them to stay home.

Edited by Fighteer on Sep 17th 2019 at 9:56:29 AM

I think Lark was talking about specifically streamlining the immigration system, not immigration in general. Dismantling ICE is a top priority—once we no longer have Nazis legally hunting down immigrants, then we can deal with making the actual process less painful.

I'm not sure I agree that talking about immigration efficiency will drive people away, but there's a lot of stuff to talk about at these debates, so things have to be prioritized.

The importance of compounding pharmacies. How, even though it's needed, they still needs to be regulated (like BADLY). Something about "Johnny Gel." And a PSA with various actors/actresses, Jack Bauer, Jimmy Kimmel (who is still salty about not getting the Emmy), Michael Bolton (and his parrot) telling the pharmacies not to use their names to endorse their product.

Seems to be the same basic issue, an important medical area that is undercut by poor regulation, gaps in oversight and corporate accounting maximizing their profits. I'm kind of amazed at how easy it seemed to be to start up a pharmacy business, you would think the certifications needed and degree'd professionals involved (since it involves a lot of chemistry) would be its own high standard.

I'm surprised by the one pharmacy that was able to set up another one after being shut down in the same place.

In which China's "singular possession of a little male Chinese Meatball kid" and absolutely no girls have disastrous consequences socially, economically, other words that escape me at the moment, dealing with a rapidly aging senior population being held up by their one "very grown up meatball" grandson, and the repercussion of implementing their machine-like "Two Child Policy."

Oh and a market for very desperate males that may or may not involve human trafficking or sex dolls.

Edited by terumokou on Oct 7th 2019 at 12:12:34 PM

I remember overpopulation problems being talked about in the early 90's, specifically learning in 6th grade about China's one child law and the preference for males. I never really gave it much thought, I guess at the time it was framed to me (intentionally or not) as an emergency measure because China was so crowded rather than the social engineering project it actually was. The level of oversight and control of its citizens to actually enforce that law is terrifying, and the ways it backfired seems rather obvious in hindsight.

The general idea of reducing overpopulation was not a bad one, but the method turned out to clash with Chinese cultural norms around family structure.

Hasn't there been research pointing out that overpopulation isn't the issue but rather distribution of resources?

Well, at some point, resource redistribution is simply not going to cut it. Even if production could keep up, there is also an increasing cost in transportation, leading to prohibitive costs. You can only redistribute so much before you run into major logistics problems. And that's not even going into it's impact on climate. The pressure of overpopulation on climate and ecology is a real problem.

Despite what Thanos claimed, population growth is not destined to be an ecological collapse. The overpopulation panic came because people saw a massive surge in the decades following World War II (likely due to industrialization impacting at the global scale). But population growth has slowed in the last decade, the theories are a combination of a lot of factors. A lot of it is connected to medical advances and the availability thereof, but also lateral social factors that influence family size. Infant mortality has dropped due to medical care and living conditions, in the past people would have 8 kids hoping at least 6 survive to adolescence. Contraceptives are more wildly available. The absolute poverty level has also diminished. People get married later in life, especially women due to higher employment rates, which also impacts the child-bearing window.

So it's really more of an irony, improving the economy and standard of living does more for population control than population control would improve the economy.

Indeed, developed nations are seeing problems with negative population growth among their middle class and higher groups. Japan in particular is hurting badly because of this combined with their cultural intolerance of immigration.

Edited by Fighteer on Oct 7th 2019 at 1:19:00 PM

Europe has been seeing such problems as well, if to a lesser extent.

BTW, I'm gonna have nightmares about that kid, Christ.

While the government interference in the personal lives of its citizens is horrific, I can't help but wonder from a hypothetical standpoint what would happen if they had set a three children limit. The one child policy was so restrictive it lead to a massive gender imbalance, which became the crux of all its other cultural problems.

Here in Singapore we had a two-child limit and as our economy improved attitudes towards family planning changed and you now have a government trying to push the new '3 children is good' slogan while we all languish in the bottom rungs of birth rates as compared to other countries.

A two-child limit makes sense in a perfect world, since two kids are the right number to replace the two parents and keep the population exactly the same forever. Obviously, there are issues with this, the most obvious of which being that we don't live in a perfect world, not everyone will live to be old enough to have two kids, even with modern day technology. There will also inevitably be plenty of people who don't want to, or can't, have children, period.

That's partially why I was thinking IF there was population control that three children would be optimal, as that would account for natural variations in birth rates. Two children would still require one male and one female to balance everything out.

Still, social engineering on such a large scale can lead to rather significant consequences, as eugenics falls under the same category.