Sharia Law in the UK unavoidable

[Khorum]

Originally Posted by GrobbeeTrull2.0

The hilarity of the Muslim world using western tactics to get their way is not lost on me. Luckily, I'll be too busy living it up in the bastion of non-Abrahamic religious thought to give a shit what is going on in Europe and America in the next 50 years.

What planet would that be on? Cuz I know you're not thinking of a religiously-free China. Noone's THAT fucking stupid.

[FulorianC]

Maybe he means Japan? /shrug

[Tolanin]

antarctic

[Khorum]

Originally Posted by ...

maybe politicians are using pro-islam as an extension of bandwagon anti American sentiment? Just random guesses. I haven't figured out why they put up with the nonsense in Europe. I understand why the Muslims go, just not why they get easy street in Europe in a parellel to how easy our Mexican invaders have it.

It's because Nativism in a deeply-ingrained European pasttime, almost as much as soccer. It's why there's a massive resurgence of ultra-right-wing hate PARTIES (not skinhead gangs in bomber jackets but full-blown political parties in suits) in the EU who openly espouse a policy of hate, suspicion and xenophobia.

The immigrant enclaves in Europe can rightly be called "ghettoes"--where people live like animals--although their immigrant populations have a large proportion of blonde-blue-eyed slavs who are discriminated because the western europeans like to think they're worth shit (which they're not). Whereas in the USA our immigrant enclaves are riotous profit centers full of entrepreneurial businesses. It's pretty dismal really. When Americans think of "immigrant enclave" we think of those parts of town jammed full with tacquerias, auto repair shops and gardeners who work for 12 hours at six bucks a pop. The concept of immigrant riots setting fire to the capital like how the muslims did in Paris a couple years ago is basically incomprehensible.

[Jimmy Carter wuwu]

Originally Posted by prescient63

Which brings up an interesting point, why the fuck is Judge Judy one of the highest paid people on TV? Do that many people really watch her show? $30 mil a year? I can't even wrap my head around that. What is her demographic? Retirees and unemployed retards?

I would assume retirees and retards, but for some reason America loves people in power of verdicts to be complete pricks. Look at Simon Cowell on American Idol, people know him because of how big of a dick he can be.

[Soriak]

Originally Posted by Khorum

The concept of immigrant riots setting fire to the capital like how the muslims did in Paris a couple years ago is basically incomprehensible.

Blacks did that in LA and other cities throughout the US. It's not a symptom of being an immigrant, it's a symptom of social conditions. France's problem is that they have so much employment protection, it's extremely difficult - if not impossible - to fire someone if they turn out to be bad at their job. So when employers get two equally qualified applicants, they take the one with the French name, hoping there'd be less of a chance of trouble.

No doubt if people could be laid off more easily (say for no reason, but with 3 months notice) this would be less of an issue. The problem in France is that this seems pretty much impossible to get passed, they tried to introduce a "trial period" where you could easily be fired and even that failed. Another idea is to have applications routed through a third party that would replace the name with a number to prevent any bias and scratch the need to provide a home address.

What i don't understand, is that, if overwhelming majority of population is unhappy with growing non-european immigration into europe and especially with their influence to western culture, how the fuck politicians are still playing "tolerance and humanitarianism" tune ?

Because we're on the path to globalization and there's no way around it. Take a look at this: Dani Rodrik's weblog: Slow down the world, I want to get off

In France, 64% think globalization is progressing too quickly, in Germany it's 52%, in the US it's 54%. People are likely overwhelmed by changes that are contrary to what has been the norm in the past. You can't have real globalization without opening up the labor market to foreign employees and that means immigration. There's no reason why an excellent IT guy in Russia should not be working in Switzerland instead, where the pay is $100k instead of $30k (or whatever they pay) - the only burden is artificially created to protect the local work force. And it leads to bad outcomes - namely a shortage of IT people everywhere you look, when there would be highly qualified people available. I guess another issue is that it's hard to find jobs in other countries, but that shouldn't be too hard to simplify thanks to the internet.

It's just not possible to go towards globalization while at the same time trying to slow down immigration - they're exactly on the opposite end of philosophies. Free market vs protectionism.

[Tolanin]

globalization has always been a tough sell to people who are already in first world countrys.

[Akileese]

Originally Posted by Drauk

Funny enough - they are not. Everybody wanted and hoped this will be the case, but it didn't worked out. I've yet to see any non-Danish cleaner for example. Here, from what i've seen, their niche is mostly taxi drivers (incredibly good position, it it tons better than taxi drivers in US), and small grocery stores.

So pretty much the same as the U.S except the taxi position in Europe is better? The area of CT I live in seems to be getting more Muslims and Indian people around every month and most of them work in the small grocery stores or drive taxis.

[AladainAF]

France's problem is that they have so much employment protection, it's extremely difficult - if not impossible - to fire someone if they turn out to be bad at their job.

Sounds like the United States government.

[Tolanin]

Originally Posted by AladainAF

Sounds like the United States government.

heh ya, its so ridiculously hard to fire public employees. I know how fucked RI is right next door to me cause of govt unions i can imagine how much trouble it is to expand that type of BS across an entire labor force.

Atleast this is one area where the US does pretty well.

[...]

Originally Posted by Soriak

You can't have real globalization without opening up the labor market to foreign employees and that means immigration.

The mexican problem is that millions of illegals come in and very little stops them. if they came across legally, did all the paper work, and (most importantly) payed taxes, it wouldn't be nearly as bad. They would have to earn minimum wage if that happened though...and then there'd be no reason for having them here in the corporation's eyes.

[Cad]

Soriak, what prevents abuse of immigration to displace local workers at a cheaper wage? If I'm an IT professional in the US but there are Russians/Indians/Chinese willing to be moved into a tenement and do my job for 1/3rd as much, half of which will be sent back to their home country while they live in squalor until they go back themselves in a few years? The companies don't get the same product (outsourced/H1B immigrants in 99% of cases provide inferior work product), the workers who can give them a superior work product are eliminated in favor of immigrants, and the money doesn't go back into the local/US economy where it will benefit us.

It's one thing if there are actual shortages but who will police abuse of the system to simply cash in for short term turnaround gains by unscrupulous business owners?

[Tolanin]

Originally Posted by Cad

Soriak, what prevents abuse of immigration to displace local workers at a cheaper wage? If I'm an IT professional in the US but there are Russians/Indians/Chinese willing to be moved into a tenement and do my job for 1/3rd as much, half of which will be sent back to their home country while they live in squalor until they go back themselves in a few years? The companies don't get the same product (outsourced/H1B immigrants in 99% of cases provide inferior work product), the workers who can give them a superior work product are eliminated in favor of immigrants, and the money doesn't go back into the local/US economy where it will benefit us.

It's one thing if there are actual shortages but who will police abuse of the system to simply cash in for short term turnaround gains by unscrupulous business owners?

globalization doesnt benefit us nearly as much as it benefits the poor workers/countries. It sorta benefits the companys but not the citizens who are already living better. It gets sorta complicated but it works on normal trade theory which does benefit both parties, but you do eventually get to the point where limited resources start to be a major factor... we arent exactly there yet but soon.

If you want a system that benefits us go for protectionist policies.

[Soriak]

Protectionism is always shortsighted. It allows a country to hang on to its current standard for a little while longer, but it's not sustainable.

Outsourcing now provides largely inferior service (especially with customer support) but why is that? People in poor countries have a very heavy accent because many of them started to learn English recently just because of CS/IT jobs. Wait 20 years and you have students who started English in high school and had a heavy curriculum - you won't notice a difference to a native English speaker. Add schools that teach entirely in English and the language disadvantage is gone entirely. The problem now is that there is too big a demand to meet entirely with good English speakers, so they put poor speakers on the low level support, which piss off customers. Note that this isn't a problem with manufacturing, which tends to work mostly.

In the early stages you can see "US support" as an advantage of a product, one you pay a premium price for. Just like flying economy or business class, you can easily provide multiple levels of support. With manufacturing it just seems there's no market for the business class "made in the US" products - people may complain about things made in China, but evidently not enough are willing to pay a premium price for US products.


Wage dumping is actually a benefit of globalization in theory. Look at it this way: Mattel used to produce its stuff in the US, which meant they had to pay US wages for manufacturing. Now they're manufacturing it in China for much lower wages. The reduced cost then leads to three things: lower prices (competition), more higher paying jobs (ie more designers, so they can expand the product line) and the company becomes more attractive to investors (higher profits = higher dividends). The customer ends up profiting from a larger selection and lower cost.

We're nowhere close to running out of resources btw, and if we get close to that it'll drive up the price and make the search for alternatives and recycling more attractive. We see that with renewable energy: the problem isn't that it can't be done, but that it's still too expensive. The more expensive oil gets, the more sense it makes to invest in alternative energy. There just has to be an expectation that the price of oil will remain high - investors were burned last time oil was high. After they made their investments, the price crashed down and suddenly their products weren't in demand anymore. If we assume that slowing down the emission of greenhouse gases is a goal that is more important than efficiency, the best way to do that is to tax oil/gas in a way that tells investors "if you can sell your product at X cents per kWH, you got yourself a market."

If I'm an IT professional in the US but there are Russians/Indians/Chinese willing to be moved into a tenement and do my job for 1/3rd as much, half of which will be sent back to their home country while they live in squalor until they go back themselves in a few years?

The ultimate goal of free movement of labor would allow the foreign IT guy to move to the US with his family and stay there as long as he's not unemployed for a longer period of time.

Economics doesn't really look at how each individual ends up, but how people in the aggregate do. The people who lose a job will of course be off worse, so will people who see their wages dropped. But since it creates many more jobs and leads to faster growth, people as a whole will do much better. It's then up to each country to provide the education/training system that assists the losers of globalization to the extent decided by voters.

The argument against globalization is pretty much the same one that was put forward during the industrial revolution, where a single machine could replace a dozen of workers. Nobody would suggest today that we get rid of machines and do everything from hand, even though it'd create a lot of jobs. In exchange we got a comparatively great education system that helps people get jobs not replaceable by machines.

You can use protectionism to ward off foreign competition, but it doesn't take long for domestic products to no longer be competitive on the global market and it can get very expensive. In Switzerland, the government sets for milk a high import toll, a minimum price and buys milk off of farmers and destroys it. Small farmers still just barely get by. Once the system is in place, good luck trying to get rid of it. No reason to pay for grain or milk 10x the price that importing it from some farmer in Azerbaijan would cost - and buying it from said farmer would have the beneficial side-effect of being the best developmental "aid" possible.

[Cad]

In the abstract I know you're right; in the reality I know that the board of directors at most small-medium sized company don't care about the success of any particular company or the health/welfare of their workers, they care about lining their own pockets, often to the detriment of the company and it's workers. I've seen it far too often. Allowing these guys to save 40% on a product by outsourcing puts a lot of people out of work which causes an inferior product to be produced which is a short term gain long term loss; but by the time the long term comes around these guys have sold out.

I think you've got to hit the right mix of protectionism and globalization. You can't go hog-wild free market because of the disproportionate amount of control executives have over the well-being of the workers and how little they really stand to lose if the company fails vs. the workers. You also don't want full-blown protectionism because it's ridiculously stifling and nobody wants to be doing the shit they do in China anyway. It's a fine line to walk between a duty to protect the well-being of your actual citizens and a duty to promote the overall aggregate wealth of your country. Since the wealth is concentrated in the hands of the few some might argue that enhancing the wealth at the cost of particular citizens is counter-productive.