Paper Retracted After Anti-Immigrant Scientist Bans Use of His Software (sciencemag.org) 418
sciencehabit writes: An 11-year-old research paper describing Treefinder, a computer program used by evolutionary biologists, has been retracted after the program's developer banned its use in European countries he deemed too friendly to refugees. In September, German scientist Gangolf Jobb announced on his website that researchers in eight European countries, including Germany and the United Kingdom, were no longer allowed to use Treefinder, which builds phylogenetic trees from sequence data. The move sparked outrage among some scientists, and now, BMC Evolutionary Biology has pulled the 2004 paper describing the software because the license change 'breaches the journal's editorial policy on software availability.'
Open Source license except H1B shops have to pay! (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's do it!
Seems counter-productive (Score:2)
So the response to a tool becoming unavailable is to make information about the tool unavailable? I appreciate that this is supposed to put some pressure on Jobb, and I enjoy petty acts of spite against nutjobs as much as the next guy. But this seems like it just further harms the tool users (and potential tool users), not so much Jobb.
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Re:Seems counter-productive (Score:5, Informative)
There's no point in having an editorial policy if you don't enforce it. The policy says the journal only allows papers on freely available software; the author submitted the article under those conditions then reneged, so he loses.
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It's a BMC journal, born in the Web age - it didn't exist in the 70s. But there may well be other software that's no longer available even in the lifetime of the journal just through link rot (which is why they encourage authors include a copy of the software and ideally the source as supplementary material).
Not anti-immigrant (Score:4, Insightful)
The most egregious yet prevalent error in modern news reporting, is to conflate someone being against ILLEGAL immigration with someone being against LEGAL immigration.
If you can't understand why someone who does not want people who are by definition criminals entering the country in large numbers, then heaven help you - because reality certainly will not and history just laughs at you.
Re:Not anti-immigrant (Score:5, Insightful)
If immigrants are granted asylum as refugees, how are they "by definition criminals"?
Still septette circumstances and ideology (Score:2, Insightful)
If a person is pardoned, it does not mean that prior to the pardon they were not a criminal.
There may be good reasons to pardon someone (or to grant asylum) but that is still a VERY different thing than supporting legal immigration which people traditionally apply for.
You can still be even for a large increase of LEGAL immigration vs. any kind of amnesty for those willing to spend the effort or money to break into the country illegally.
Of course you do realize supporting mostly amnesty instead of legal immi
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You are creating a false dichotomy and clearing forgetting about how this country came to be. The Irish came to this country in much the same fashion and numbers as Mexicans. They were fleeing starvation and lack of opportunity for a land that could provide them with opportunity as well as sustenance. It amazes me how similar the rhetoric is. The Chinese immigrants went through much the same which is why they ended up building large portions of our rail system that we use even today.
We closed our borders a
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I'm saying that by forbidding use in countries that grant asylum, the author of this program is demonstrating a stance against even legal immigration.
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Re:Not anti-immigrant (Score:5, Informative)
Starting from 1st October 2015, I do no longer permit the usage of my TREEFINDER software in the following EU countries: Germany, Austria, France, Netherlands, Belgium, Great Britain, Sweden, Denmark - the countries that together host most of the non-european immigrants. For all other countries, the old license agreement remains valid. USA has already been excluded from using Treefinder in February 2015. This is all in accordance with the license agreement stated in the TREEFINDER manual since the earliest versions, which reserves me the right to change the license agreement at any time. I can do this because Treefinder is my own property.
The reason: I am no longer willing to support with my work the political system in Europe and Germany, of which the science system is part. There is no genuine democracy, and I disagree with almost all of the policies. In particular, I disagree with immigration policy. Immigration to my country harms me, it harms my family, it harms my people. Whoever invites or welcomes immigrants to Europe and Germany is my enemy. Immigration is the huge corporations' interest, not peoples' interest. I am not against helping refugees, but they would have to be kept strictly separated from us Europeans, for some limited time only until they return home, and not being integrated here as cheap workers and additional consumers. Immigration unnecessarily defers the collapse of capitalism, its final crisis. The earlier the system crashes, the more damage can be avoided. Possibly a civil war in Europe. Not to mention the loss of our European genetic and cultural heritage.
The most egregious yet prevalent error in modern news reporting, is to conflate someone being against ILLEGAL immigration with someone being against LEGAL immigration.
How can these immigrants be ILLEGAL when the countries named allow them entry? That seems like a giant flaw in your point.
If you can't understand why someone who does not want people who are by definition criminals entering the country in large numbers, then heaven help you - because reality certainly will not and history just laughs at you.
Are the majority of people in this wave criminals? Where in the world did you get that information other than your own bias? The UN seems to disagree with you.
Re:Not anti-immigrant (Score:5, Insightful)
He says, " Immigration to my country harms me, it harms my family, ..." Are there a lot of immigrants writing software that builds phylogenetic trees from sequence data? Are they taking his job as a programmer and/or scientist? And, if so, does that harm him more if done (by either a local or immigrant) in his country than abroad? His work can be done anywhere.
Or is he simply a xenophobic racist?
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Well, he's suggesting that it alters how the government spends money, which he presumably pays in taxes. Also, his family could be in some other way impacted by immigration.
To be honest, he could be xenophobic and racist. Or perhaps he is just fine with people from those places as long as they don't impact him in a manner he considers dangerous to him.
Let's look at H1-Bs. There's nothing particularly wrong with Indians. They generally share the same spectrum of smart/dumb, nice/asshole that every other
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He states his reason as the following:
So, considering his concern for the loss of "European genetic and cultural heritage", I think it is safe to say there is some racism involved.
Or he likes his culture and his country and he'd like to see it remain the way it is. It's nationalistic, but not necessarily racist.
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They are not unskilled, and Germany has the best work training programmes in the entire world. You'd know this if your purported expertise was in any way factual.
Germany's population is getting older. It needs hundreds of thousands of immigrants every year just to maintain it. Hundreds of thousands of people, including a large amount of well-trained (university educated) people can be a gift to Germany if handled correctly. Right now it's the xenophobes who are hurting Germany more.
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The current federal minimum wage would give a full-time worker about $15k / year. A two-person household's poverty level is $16k, according to politifact's figuring. That's the federal government's stated income level, but I can't think of too many places in this country where that will even pay for rent, and if you're in a big city, you're either homeless, have a two-hour commute, or making well well above minimum wage.
When indexed to inflation, the minimum wage has fallen by nearly 10% since the 60s.
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How can these immigrants be ILLEGAL when the countries named allow them entry? That seems like a giant flaw in your point.
Maybe they didn't allow the Syrian TSA to go through their stuff when they were crossing the border? I'll bet that's at least a misdemeanor.
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Xenophobes are rarely logical. Germany desperately needs hundreds of thousands of immigrants just to support the ageing population, yet this guy seems to think they're hurting him (and his family, etc.). That speaks volumes to just how much of this issue he doesn't understand. Germany - and him and his family - need these immigrants. This is demonstrable fact, and not a surprise to anyone who's spent any time trying to understand what's going on.
Re:Not anti-immigrant (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not anti-immigrant (Score:4, Insightful)
How in the hell does cheap foreign labor taking someone else's job undercut national and nationalist prejudices? That's just... silly.
The free flow of labor across national boundaries is *always* from cheap to expensive, thus undercutting the wages of the existing working class. That does nothing but piss off the existing working class, making them *more* nationalistic, not less.
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If a store owner decides not to charge you for items in his shop, are you a thief?
If he's German, I'm starting to think I should ask for a receipt in case he changes his mind right after I walk out the door.
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The most egregious yet prevalent error in modern news reporting, is to conflate someone being against ILLEGAL immigration with someone being against LEGAL immigration.
If you can't understand why someone who does not want people who are by definition criminals entering the country in large numbers, then heaven help you - because reality certainly will not and history just laughs at you.
except in the U.S., immigration laws are considered civil, not criminal, matters. persons here without immigration authorization are not criminals, by the actual definitions used in the law.
this may differ in other countries, but typically immigration law has been under civil and not criminal statutes.
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Can I get an even an anon explanation of why this is offtopic?
I am far more welcoming of immigrants than you (Score:2)
On a less polite side note, your comment sounds quite xenophobic.
Why? I am for a massive expansion of LEGAL immigration. But you have to make the process fair, the way the current system works is those strong enough or with the most resources get to come into a country and take up room and jobs that could have been had by LEGAL immigrants, who are crowded out.
Do you often push people out of the way to go to the head of lines? Because that is what is happening here, the most privileged are denying the wea
Is it even possible? (Score:4, Interesting)
Or did the new license only apply to new versions of the software?
Licenses that forbid redistribution (Score:2)
Is it even possible to retroactively change the terms of a software license like that?
It is if the license requires users to obtain a copy of the software directly from the publisher, not from a redistributor.
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What about the copies he's already given? Can he change the terms of those copies?
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Corporations apparently can, and do it all the time.
Many of us disagree you should be able to change the terms of a license retroactively or at all.
But since corporations have apparently bought the right to do it, why not crazy idiots?
EULA because fuck you (Score:2)
You'll use it like I tell you to use it, and when I decide I want to change how you use it you'll fucking change how you use it.
Copyright, bitch. Death plus seventy years - all the way to your great-grandchildren.
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Is it even possible to retroactively change the terms of a software license like that?
Or did the new license only apply to new versions of the software?
Even before he went completely off the rails, the author had this weird thing where the user had to click to agree with the CURRENT version of the licence (which he could change at any time) every time the package was run, or else create a text file in a specified format (which the software would check on startup) where they promised always to abide by the latest licence and basically be his bitch. Whether this sort of nonsense is actually legal is another thing, of course.
The immigration problem in question (Score:3, Informative)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Most of the first migrants to come to our country over the past few decades were the richest, bravest, and most intelligent. Now however, we're getting a flood of third worlders, and as a result, the crime rate is going up whilst the economy will go down. It's an invasion in slow motion.
Sweden's got it worse than even us, as people can barely speak out over there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Pure utter BS that should get you smacked upside the head with a reality stick, instead of modded up.
The 'richest, bravest, intelligent', as if they are somehow more worthy, and were less desperate for an improvement in circumstances, even though that's the primary motivation in migration. This is simply racism, claiming that current migrants are somehow inferior and different from previous ones.
No the crime rate isnt going up; migrants almost always have lower crime rates than the native population.
No the
A discussion about this without virtue signaling (Score:2)
It would be wonderful if, on an internet forum, we could have a discussion about a topic such as this without virtue signaling. For whatever reason, it seems impossible.
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Is anyone these days NOT outraged? (Score:2)
Might just be easier to ask it that way.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Banned in the US since February (Score:3)
License change and re-release in February 2015:
Starting from 1st February 2015, I do no longer permit the usage of my TREEFINDER software in the USA. For all other countries, the old license agreement remains valid.
http://www.treefinder.de/ [treefinder.de]
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So what's the legality of retrospectively changing a licence? By all accounts all the people who agreed to the original license in the USA are still valid users of it today providing the service isn't subscription based.
Any other applications of this policy? (Score:2)
I wonder, what — if any — other applications of this policy can be found. Has there ever been another case of this same publication withdrawing an already published article over "software availability"?
I also wonder, if they'd have acted, if the license-changes were aimed not at immigration-supporters, but at, say, "Nazi-sympathizers" or "Global Warming-deniers"?
My own license for a tiny open-source program bans owners of Che Guev
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Ok, can you cite a single example of this same policy applied before by this same publication? And if you find more than one such example at all, let's try to filter anything, which Che Guevara or Bernie Sanders would find disagreeable...
Treefinder license changes (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.treefinder.de/
Original License
Great test for what EULA conditions are binding (Score:3)
Theyre not refugees! (Score:4, Interesting)
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How is that not a refugee? It's not like they built up a permanent residence in Turkey.
Re:Easy to explain (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no question. The publisher is reacting to the change in license as well they should. Regardless of the motivation the license change violates their policy. What's the point of having a policy and then not following it?
Following policy (Score:2)
They could treat the policy like some countries are treating their immigration laws.
They are, namely following them. The journal's publisher is following its policy of retracting papers that rely on unavailable software. And some countries are using their sovereign authority to grant asylum to those who qualify as refugees.
Re:Following policy (Score:5, Insightful)
The only interesting question here is whether this would be a controversy if it were happening in reverse - if the author was denying it to countries who are not taking in refugees.
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Countries have sovereign authority. And constitutions that specify the guidelines on how to exercise said authority. Elected executives don't get to ignore said guidelines. They are not Kings.
I agree. If these guidelines give authority to the country's legislature and immigration agency to accept these refugees, there's no problem. I'm not familiar with the laws of Europe, but for example, the United States Constitution gives Congress wide latitude "To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization", and it delegates some of this rulemaking authority to the executive through the agency known as U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS, formerly called INS).
However, there appears to be an im
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That said, I also have serious restrictions to an unfettered Muslim migration to any non-Muslim region.
How so, unless immigrant parents physically force their children to practice Islam?
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Isn't that usually how religion passes from one generation to another?
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I believe #50916535 was referring to present-day living Germans, not Germans who have since died of old age.
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One of the main reasons there are issues with migrants in Europe right now is the very fact that Germany declared itself a free for all with no way for those migrants to make it to Germany without forcing the countries in the migrants paths to break their own laws.
I think the thing that is really going to bite Europe in the butt with this is the fact that if even 0.1% of those migrants are radicalized then Europe is going to end up with large numbers of terrorists in their midst. I would also bet its more
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Europe is facing that already. Look at what happened in Paris with Charlie Hebdo, then the wave of violence and terror related arrests throughout many countries in the region following those attacks. There's debate as to whether or not Germany is even obeying its laws, because a lot of these "refugees" don't really seem to meet the definition of the term. They're migrating for economic reasons, not necessarily because they fear for their lives. Germany is rejecting a significant number of them, but that
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Refugees should probably not just mean people who are migrating to a wealthier place to get on the dole.
Re: Easy to explain (Score:5, Funny)
I've seen plenty of them working. They harvest crops, work construction, pave roads or anything where they need cheap labor. If it weren't for the flood of people from South of the border I don't know how all this stuff would get done. We'd probably have to make all the people on welfare go back to work.
Re: Easy to explain (Score:4, Insightful)
or you can pay a decent wage?
That's not very "business friendly."
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You clearly have never been to a Home Depot in the morning on a work day.
I FOR ONE WELCOME OUR MEXICAN OVERLORDS (Score:5, Interesting)
This is why I will never say anything bad about Mexican immigrants. You see dozens of them out at Home Depot waiting patiently for hard work. I have NEVER seen a unemployed white guy out there. I only ever see white people standing on street corners with cardboard signs, begging for handouts. I welcome immigrants (documented or otherwise) willing to come to our country and work hard to get ahead. Good for them. The only welfare leeches I see are the native citizens with a sense of entitlement that aren't willing to try to do some real work when they are unemployed.
Re:I FOR ONE WELCOME OUR MEXICAN OVERLORDS (Score:5, Insightful)
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If there is more than one person on the corner, they call that a "stabbing." It is lucrative, but only for a few seconds. Then it goes sideways.
Re: I FOR ONE WELCOME OUR MEXICAN OVERLORDS (Score:3)
Unless your home language us cherokee or apache or navajo or something you are not a "native" American.
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Good thing you have no ancestors in you phylogenetic tree that were immigrants.
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How is this action wrong? If you violate the policy for having your paper published it then gets retracted.
Re:Easy to explain (Score:5, Informative)
The researcher has decided to act like a childish asshole.
The publisher has said "unfortunately, due to your stupid manifesto we can no longer carry this paper because it violates our policy [biomedcentral.com]".
This guy is perfectly allowed to go all crazy and issue his manifesto of "you can't use my stuff". That doesn't mean that other entities are required to keep hosting his stuff.
The publisher is following a policy, and the people who wrote the paper agree [nih.gov].
So, really, the only one acting immature is the childish idiot who has decided he's taking his ball and going home, and making up random rules about who can use his software.
But he can own that decision and the consequences.
This isn't two wrongs making a right, this is an idiot living with the real world consequences of being an idiot.
Re:Easy to explain (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree with most of that, but I think you missed the most important point: why is key academic software not open source? I'm all for this guy's right to publish software under any license he chooses, but why would you embrace such software in the academic community? IMO, that's the lesson here.
Re:Easy to explain (Score:5, Interesting)
why is key academic software not open source?
Because people do the minimum required to get publications (and/or money), and cleaning up source code (so it can be exposed to the world) is a lot of work. This is especially the case if the code depends on other libraries with various different software licenses.
One of the ways to help fix this problem is to place restrictions on publication, so that open source licences are required for software. F1000 Research has just changed their policy to do this:
http://blog.f1000research.com/... [f1000research.com]
We recently strengthened our stance on software availability to better align with our Open Science principles. Now, the source code underlying any newly presented software must be made publicly available and assigned an open license. We strongly encourage the use of an OSS approved licence, but will accept other open licenses including Creative Commons. Software papers describing non-open software, code and/or web tools will be rejected.
The current situation demonstrates that forcing these licenses is required in order to get people to use them. BMC Evolutionary Biology already had a recommendation for open source licenses in its policy:
BMC Evolutionary Biology recommends , but does not require, that the source code of the software should be made available under a suitable open-source license that will entitle other researchers to further develop and extend the software if they wish to do so. Typically, an archive of the source code of the current version of the software should be included with the submitted manuscript as a supplementary file. Since it is likely that the software will continue to be developed following publication, the manuscript should also include a link to the home page for the software project. For open source projects, we recommend that authors host their project with a recognized open-source repository such as bioinformatics.org or sourceforge.net
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Open source doesn't mean free.
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br Yea i sort of am personally know the guy. Sort of. in a round about way. He has been a certified nut job for the ten years I was on his batshit insane mailing list.
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you state this, "The researcher has decided to act like a childish asshole."
Care to explain?
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But Brawndo's got what plants crave. It's got electrolytes.
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Did OkCupid act like an asshole when they blocked Firefox to demonstrate their disdain for Mozilla's CEO?
Yeah, pretty much. They were both dicks. Restricting access to software to those whose political beliefs you share is going down a pretty dark path.
Re:The strings are his to attach (Score:4, Insightful)
I spent 3 years in Germany while in the US air force. While I found the German people to be very friendly for the most part I did notice a decided antipathy towards foreign immigrants from Turkey. It sort of surprised me but then I thought about it and it pretty much paralleled how many people in the US act towards Mexican immigrants.
Re:The strings are his to attach (Score:5, Insightful)
It sort of surprised me but then I thought about it and it pretty much paralleled how many people in the US act towards Mexican immigrants.
Legal or illegal Mexican immigrants? I live in San Antonio and we are extremely tolerant toward legal Mexican immigrants. The Mexican Americans are not please with the illegal ones due to the jobs and resources they lose/share. For the most part, they really look down on them.
Besides organizations like LaRaza, most of the support for illegal Mexicans comes from white people - usually either due to reasons of "white guilt" or cheap labor.
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I'm sure that's true, due to your extensive knowledge. Also, most black people agree with you that black teens need to pull their pants up and stop blaming society for there problems, and most gays agree with you that homosexuals should have some legal protection but not be given full rights of marriage, which are historically understood to be between a man and a woman.
The liberals are making up these platforms all themselves! All people discriminated against, in any way, know that right wing Texans speak
Re:The strings are his to attach (Score:4, Interesting)
Legal or illegal Mexican immigrants? I live in San Antonio and we are extremely tolerant toward legal Mexican immigrants. The Mexican Americans are not please with the illegal ones due to the jobs and resources they lose/share. For the most part, they really look down on them.
Maybe that's just a San Antonio thing. In the rest of the country, Mexican Americans are trying every rhetorical and legal trick they can to make illegal immigrants welcomed. That includes:
*) Lobbying for "sanctuary city" status, where the local government is prohibited from working with state/feds unless the subject is suspected of non-immigration-related crimes.
*) Opposition to the phrase "illegal immigrants," because they say a person can't be illegal. Even though their very presence is a continued, illegal action, that there's pretty much nothing they can do short of returning across the border without it being illegal.
*) Using "immigrant" as much as possible to describe both legal and illegal immigrants. They want to blur that line as much as possible so they can attack politicians and other groups for being "anti-immigrant," when they only oppose illegal immigrants.
*) The usual cries about pulling apart families, etcetc.
*) Not bring up the issue of legal immigrants going through the legal process and waiting to become US citizens. They don't want to talk about that at all.
I disagree with the assertion that most of the support comes from white people. Just listen to Latino USA on NPR, watch Univision, or other Hispanic or Mexican American channels. It's stated by both sides without controversy that the reason Republicans have so little support with Hispanic/Mexican-American is their illegal immigration stance, and their attempts to court those ethnicities is a big reason why Republicans have blocked action on illegal immigration matters.
Re:The strings are his to attach (Score:4, Insightful)
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[Citation Needed]
Illegal immigration is pretty damn high, but I guess you have numbers to show this significant reduction.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fac... [pewresearch.org]
The numbers are about half of what Trump says the numbers are though:
http://www.politifact.com/flor... [politifact.com]
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So extremely tolerant that it is now a major rhetorical issue even though illegal immigration is 1/4 of what it was a decade ago and illegal Mexican immigration has fallen by 1/2.
It's been a problem for a long time, not just now. It was a big enough problem that Reagan gave mass amnesty in exchange for stronger borders and the understanding that mass amnesty would never need to be offered again.
We are a territorial species (Score:4, Insightful)
At the end of the day the fighting is always about resources but we justify and rationalise it with our natural xenophobia. This is the way "nature intended", it is in the wetware toolbox we were given at birth. Peaceful co-existence in a land of plenty is what we all want, ironically our xenophobic tendencies mean we are more than willing to wipe out other tribes to get it.
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Yes you do- or can. It's all about efficiency and productivity though. Paying someone who produces 1000 units an hour an extra 10 dollars per hour comes out to just 1 cent difference on the per unit costs.Of course taxes add to it and it wouldn't be that simple because there would be an additional employment tax as well as social security and so on on top of that 10 dollars but you can get the point easily.
It is a lot harder however when you are providing serv
Re:The strings are his to attach (Score:4, Informative)
Yes you do- or can. It's all about efficiency and productivity though. Paying someone who produces 1000 units an hour an extra 10 dollars per hour comes out to just 1 cent difference on the per unit costs.Of course taxes add to it and it wouldn't be that simple because there would be an additional employment tax as well as social security and so on on top of that 10 dollars but you can get the point easily.
It is a lot harder however when you are providing services of some sort or when the production is lower. At 100 units per hour, the cost difference would be roughly 10 cents per unit (not considering taxes and all). So if someone could pick your tomatoes at a rate of 100 packs an hour (lets say 2 tomatoes to a pack), paying them $20 an hour would have a cost associated with 20 cents on each pack of tomatoes purchased. Paying them a minimum wage of $7.25 per hour would be 13 some cents cheaper so it isn't a huge cost increase to pay them a little more.
Where it hurts is when you can only service or produce 10 units per hour. An extra $10 dollar per hour would be $1 per unit. A typical waitress at one of these full service chain restaurants can likely handle 4 to 6 tables an hour depending on the number of people at each table. If every table leave $2 for a tip, they are earning $8 to $12 more per hour than their base salary. But as restaurants usually have it, they are not packed enough at all times of the day to enable this type of turnover so there will be several hours which the waitress/waiter would only service 1 or 2 units per hour and you would need a tip increased quite a bit to make up the difference.
For a single tomato, 20 cents a tomato vs. 8 cents doesn't seem like a lot but to someone like a Sam's Club who buys millions of tomatoes it's a huge difference. And you have to remember that picking the tomato is just one step in the process of getting it to the produce counter. If you paid everyone along with way $20 an hour, the cost of a single tomato would be much larger than it is today. The other thing about tomatoes (and produce in general) is that there's a huge amount of loss between the time they are picked and the time they are bought. I used to work in a produce department while in college. We'd sometimes throw away entire cases as soon as they came off the truck. For the remaining cases, a certain percentage wasn't fit to sell, so they would get tossed in the process of filling the display. Then a couple of times a day at least, the ones on display would be gone through and the ones started to look bad would get pulled.
It wouldn't surprise me at all that for every tomato sold, at least one is tossed and that money has to be recouped in the price of the tomatoes that actually get sold.
Re:The strings are his to attach (Score:5, Informative)
Thing is, in the EU (as in, throughout the EU), the antipathy is a lot higher, and for good reason: As a general guideline, unemployment is usually a touch higher than in the US, and job growth is a touch lower (though in some countries this difference is rather dramatic), leading to a lot of antagonism.
Recently, it's grown primarily because of the actions and crimes committed by a number of these migrants, as well as the increased strain on the far-more-generous social welfare systems of these countries (which as a corollary, appears to be leading to even higher taxation).
If you think the Germans are vicious about it, you should take a gander at Nebelspalter [nebelspalter.ch] (a Swiss parody magazine) and look up the opinions there on the subject...
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Yep, not just Germany. Check out the violent crime and rape stats in Sweden: http://www.gatestoneinstitute.... [gatestoneinstitute.org]
It's not so much that the statistics went up, it's that the courts are sympathizing with the rapists! Mind-boggling.
P.S. to mods: This is not a troll. This is data.
Re:The strings are his to attach (Score:4, Insightful)
I've heard the exact same things said about Mexican immigrants in the US, yet I had no specific problems with my neighbours, my classmates when I was in school, or classmates of my kids. I've also heard the same thing said about Panamanians when I was in Costa Rica for a while. And for people from Botswana when I was in South Africa.
All too often people are vague when referencing problems like this because they don't have more specific things to say. Or they do have specifics, but aren't comfortable with saying what the actual problem is because some part of them doesn't think it is wrong to be upset over that. Just saying things of the lines of, "spend some time with people X and you would know why they are a problem," backfires when some people have spent time and still don't have a problem.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It's the cultural differences that matter.
In the EU the cultures don't vary much, even when comparing most western to most eastern countries. Turks, Syrians, Kurds are very very different than, say, Romanians, Greeks or Bulgarians.
This matters a lot because while you change the country, changing yourself is hard and many of them bring that culture with them, finding it easier to compromise a little and continue as they did back home instead of adopting everything from their new country.
This is what angers p
Re:The strings are his to attach (Score:5, Interesting)
There was this old guy who was a friend of my wife's family who was smart, and funny, and an all around reasonable guy -- unless the topic of hispanics came up. And then it was like he was a totally different person. He became a ranter, and everyone around him would try to change the subject.
It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that he hated Hispanics. As far as he was concerned if you were born hispanic that automatically made you useless, human trash. For the life of me I couldn't figure out where he got that hatred. As it turns out I grew up in the same neighborhood he did, albeit forty years later, and only when I was a kid were there many hispanics moving in. He'd moved up in the world after WW2; he left the neighborhood and lived in a series of lily-white suburbs. So as far as I could tell he'd never even *known* any hispanics personally.
And in the end I came to the conclusion that was the whole point. He didn't hate backs, or Poles, or Jews, or Catholics or Italians -- because he grew up in a neighborhood with all of those kinds of people, or served with them during the war. His opinions on hispanics was formed in a kind of vacuum. After that forty years of confirmation bias, unchecked by any actual firsthand experience turned what had been commonplace casual bigotry into full-blown batshit craziness.
Re: (Score:3)
And the paper is theirs to pull.
Everybody wins.
Re: (Score:2)
I find it hard to believe that even the most broad interpretation of "hate speech" would cover this. Maybe if the guy came out and said "I hate all Muslims!" you could make that case. But you can't criminalize someone for criticizing a government policy decision, whatever you think their motivation might be. If you've gone that far down the rabbit hole, you've definitely created a totalitarian state.
Re: (Score:2)
Does it?
Because, if your interpretation of the "hate speech" laws were taken, then any speech, that offends anybody, can be classified as "hateful" and thus illegal.
It is for this reason, I might add, America's Founding Fathers have been aghast at the idea of criminalizing any speech. For example: [nationalhu...center.org]:
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Some people recognize immigrant has become synonymous with "slave" or "underclass", depending on the culture.
When the US Republicans talk about needing to compete in the global economy and how the US is strangling business, they aren't talking about the EU powerhouses which have higher business and social taxes. They are talking about the industrializing asian nations with penny wages and how the US needs to compete with them (ostensibly via the immigrant workforce). Many western nations have a similar prob
Re: (Score:3)
The fun bit is that there's no need for cheap foreigners to drive down wages in Germany. The unemployment benefits system is designed to take care of it.
If you have worked enough in the last 3 years, you can get up to 12 months of full unemployment benefits depending on your age (60% of your previous salary without kids, 67% with kids). If you refuse a "reasonable job offer", you don't get the benefits for up to 12 weeks. Reasonable is defined as "up to 3 hours daily commute" and paying 80% of your previous
Re: (Score:2)
The summary is correct. He is against all immigration, both refugee and otherwise.
Re:LOL (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not simply a matter of calling someone a neo-na%i f**ta7d
Re: (Score:3)
I'll give you a hint: science has nothing to do with politics, and restricting access to science based on lack of support for Nazi policies makes him a neo-Nazi fucktard. And you a neo-Nazi sympathizer.
Re: LOL (Score:3)
I agree. So everybody of European descent in North America... if you would kindly board the boats in an orderly line...