I suspect the argument is for the forces to be available in house, at least for the near to mid term. Depending on how the n American auto industry turns out, there might be various military vehicles being built to transport them.
If they ban immigration, will we hear a repeat of Japan’s “aging population, declining tax income” stories? If you need young or specialized workers, get cracking on birthing as that’ll provide candidates in 18-30 years.
The overwhelming majority of swiss immigrants are either highly skilled individuals that the swiss population cannot produce in numbers or they do jobs locals won't do (cleaning, etc).
Good luck telling Swiss pharma or any other of their specialized industries to live without immigrants, they can close tomorrow. Immigrants are an insane boost to Swiss economy.
Also, I lived and been in Switzerland few times after, there's virtually no problematic immigrants. I've never ever felt the slightest danger, even walking at night with nobody but the kind of immigrants you don't like, you just don't.
Even though foreigners are overrepresented compared to locals (as in any other country in the world with immigrants they are the poorest and thus more inclined) the absolute numbers are very very low.
So no, higher or lower number of immigrants don't have linear correlations. Switzerland has an insane number of expats and immigrants as % of the population, insanely higher than the US or other countries like Poland or Italy, yet their crime numbers are fractional.
Find the market clearing price for unwanted jobs with domestic labor. Any job will be done at the right compensation. This is what UBI would do. I prefer this versus continuing to require an imported underclass. With my apologies to the conservative mental model, “starve the beast” but of cheap labor.
You know that 30%+ of Swiss population is foreign born?
36% of the workforce is foreign born.
In Zurich, Geneve, Lausanne, 44%+ of the residents are foreigners, and more than half the workforce is foreigners. And that's even ignoring how many people work there but reside in neighbouring countries (France border is close to Geneve and Lausanne is close and even has a boat between the two sides mostly carrying workers).
If you think that a Swiss national (which has several advantages from a hiring perspective) is going to be cleaning your toilet, no matter the money, without having higher paying options you're absolutely out of your mind.
Switzerland is a tiny country, it cannot grow endlessly in population.
Albeit it's density is lower than comparable Belgium, Switzerland is crossed by the alps so the real available land is much smaller, virtually all of the residents live in 30% of the space.
In any case, that's the beauty of Switzerland: Swiss citizens can decide for themselves. I've seen many referendums in Switzerland and I've rarely seen Swiss citizens vote against their interest. Proposals have often an initial support, which fades as people discuss it and investigate it more.
Populism has really low grip there, politicians riding emotions have little legislative power.
i'm okay w importing workers if they're treated the same as domestic workers. its the system we have now that incentivizes importing and abusing workers by somehow pretending that employers have no role at all in illegal immigration and only punishing the immigrants that fails miserably at everything immigration policy says it's supposed to do.
Ahh, but the purpose of the system is what it does. Would employers and countries import immigrants if they had to treat them the same as domestic workers?
Switzerland doesn't really have jobs locals wont do like other countries. e.g. cleaning pays enough that it's as respectable a profession as any other.
I've never ever met a single cleaning staff that wasn't foreigner, and I lived both in Lausanne and Zurich.
Low paying jobs are predominantly staffed by foreigners. Swiss youth has a huge array of opportunities even without education, let alone many interesting tricks to not work a lot and still make money.
> "many interesting tricks to not work a lot and still make money."
As someone not very familiar with Switzerland I'm curious what you mean by this, as I assume from your wording you don't simply mean generous benefits available to unemployed and low wage people?
It's markedly more difficult and expensive for even highly skilled individuals to obtain Swiss residency, speaking from personal experience. Unlike the rest of Western Europe where you can claim to be a Dr. Engineer on asylum and become a citizen a few years down the line so that you can threaten Christmas markets and take shits in churches without repercussion in future. Maintaining a low target population helps in the vetting process and ensures companies prioritize skill needs over lowering costs. The drawback here being it becomes more appealing for companies to export jobs abroad, at the citizens' expense.
Another country which has a similar strict immigration regime - Singapore. And for a direct opposite, there's the Gulf countries, which let everyone and their dog in, so that they can be part of the slaving class for the locals.
The Constitution doesn’t require a well-regulated militia - it simply says the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. The militia is mentioned as a reason, not a condition.
It clearly says a well regulated militaries is necessary for the security of a free state. You can dither on whether the Constitution establishes a secure state or a free one, but the syllogism is there
The militia is mentioned first, but I’m not an English major who is able to parse old sentences. The militia is “necessary” so they need to know where the, erm, candidates are located and what they pack.
Go for it. This allows the remaining NATO members to proceed with their own defence and more importantly, their own hardware and guidelines. And, to be honest, the US prefers Russia to NATO which makes it inconvenient.
Not going to be all that good for US defence contractors, but they'll figure something out.
Can’t read the article due to bandwidth. If the era of jobs is over, what’s going to support the masses of people who consume? Without those people, there’s no profit from making stuff. Star Trek looks great, but there’s a whole lot of time, politics and physics that has to occur to get there.
its not though... there is literally an infinite amount of work. If humans become 10,000x more efficient, then we still have infinite amount of work to do.
Not necessarily true. There are non-human bottlenecks to productivity, like energy, land area, available raw materials, etc. You're assuming humans can find ways to meaningfully contribute that do not bump up against any of those constraints. R&D is probably the only area not bottlenecked by one of the above out of the gate, and most humans are ill suited for that line of work.
> most humans are ill suited for that line of work.
Based on what? Certainly there are humans with crippling disabilities that remove them from pretty much any kind of work, but of the "normally functioning" population?
Most lack the necessary attention directed towards R&D as they're too busy living out other lives in other jobs. If that's what you mean, that is a fair point. But if those jobs went away as suggested earlier, they'd have nothing else to do but turn their attention towards R&D. That current world model wouldn't apply anymore.
Several decades of academic achievement data, psychology studies, etc. I get the argument that "the whole world would be different, so present data isn't applicable", but, if that's your argument, then it's totally unfalsifiable.
> Several decades of academic achievement data, psychology studies, etc.
Right. That much was obvious. But what does that mean in more detail? If you pick a random, normally capable, person off the street and give them everything they need to become successful in R&D, what ends up happening?
> If you pick a random, normally capable, person off the street and give them everything they need to become successful in R&D, what ends up happening?
Don't we run that experiment on every moderately wealthy child on the planet? I can tell you that the hit rate there is definitely not 100%.
I don't know. You're the one who has studied the data, not me. What's the answer?
If you are asking about what I've seen anecdotally, which is all you can expect of me given that I am not the one of us who is the subject matter expert between us, all those who were moderately wealthy children that I know have grown up into having success with R&D in at least some limited capacity. They haven't all dedicated their lives to R&D, but they've had no trouble being able to invent things when the situation necessitated it.
If they had more time to dedicate their life to it, I see no reason for why that would stop. But, again, you're the expert among us here. I don't know much about it — that is why I'm asking you.
Aside, R&D fundamentally isn't guaranteed to deliver fruit, so elaborate for us on how the research you spoke of differentiates between someone who is well suited to R&D work but never strikes gold due to the nature of the beast, and someone who cannot strike gold because they are straight up incapable as a person. That might help us communicate about this more effectively.
> which is all you can expect of me given that I am not the one of us
Not sure why the snark is necessary. Its pretty easy to look up academic achievement stratified by socioeconomic status. I'm not an expert, but the line for rich kids doesn't go to 100%.
> If they had more time to dedicate their life to it, I see no reason for why that would stop.
Because not everyone is a bottomless pit of ambition. Most people, given the option, engage in leisure in their free time.
> Aside, R&D fundamentally isn't guaranteed to deliver fruit, so elaborate for us on how the research you spoke of differentiates between someone who is well suited to R&D work but never strikes gold due to the nature of the beast, and someone who cannot strike gold because they are straight up incapable as a person. That might help us communicate about this more effectively.
I'm speaking in generalities. Research is generally a race, and the smartest and hardest working generally win the race. Even if everyone's IQ and ambition shot up, there would still be a smarter and harder working subset of people.
After that last paragraph, it isn't clear to me that you disagree with my core premise of "not everyone should do research".
Not sure why you think a computer screen is giving you snark, but you do you.
> I'm not an expert
You read through all of that data and research, as told earlier, and haven't become an expert...? Yeah right. No need to be so modest with me. Be proud of your achievements!
> Its pretty easy to look up academic achievement stratified by socioeconomic status.
It may be, but no need to waste time sauntering off on another, rather uninteresting, subject. We're talking about R&D, not academic achievement. Stay focused, by friend.
> Most people, given the option, engage in leisure in their free time.
R&D is the leisure activity of many people. We'll leave your data sources to quantify exactly what that means, but it is clearly large enough to be a recognizable set of the population.
> Research is generally a race
It can be where you are trying to be first to build a moat around something that scales massively. But not all R&D scales, or even wants to scale. Despite your unquantified "generally" claim, it remains unclear if most R&D is even trying to scale. There are a lot of hobbyists out there carrying out R&D with no plans for it beyond doing something for themselves.
> there would still be a smarter and harder working subset of people.
There is seemingly no end to how much R&D is possible. I guess at some point there is a pinnacle of human achievement, but it seems highly unlikely that we'll reach that point in the next thousand years. Humans are pretty shortsighted — the people from the year 1200 would have never imagined digital computers being a thing — but when the time comes we always find something new to immerse our thoughts in.
> You read through all of that data and research, as told earlier, and haven't become an expert...? Yeah right. No need to be so modest with me. Be proud of your achievements!
Okay. You seem upset, so I'll disengage. Have a great day!
As valuable as that diversion no doubt was for you, we still haven't established from your data sources how many people are involved in R&D in a hobby/pleasure/necessity capacity and how that compares to those who have chosen to dedicate their lives towards it.
If it is not in the data, you can say so, but it becomes impossible to know how the average person performs in R&D without it. Which then returns us to the original question: "Based on what?"
Jobs functions will change over time. Not everyone will be able to do research roles, but robotics is far away from replacing human hands in any meaningful way. Humans need plumbers, home construction, healthcare professionals [0], teachers, judges, relationship driven roles (sales, account managers).
[0] - if robotics/ai can replace healthcare, healthcare costs would drop to zero...
1) Everything you've listed has finite demand, so cannot provide the 10,000x.
2) Robotics cannot drive costs to zero. Robots cost money and require maintenance.
Sure but at some point if literally everything tangible and essentially every imaginable commercial service can be done by robots and also designed by AI better than a human, humans are basically relegated to what kind of work? Something like being the exotic dancer or baby factory for a robot factory heir, or maybe a meat sacrifice on a Ukraine-esque battlefield to fight the other group of capital holders.
Increase Total Factor Productivity so that there's still just as much stuff to go around even with fewer people putting in less work to make the stuff.
UBI sees everyone receive an income, typically with a clawback mechanism. GBI sees an income paid to only those who need the support (means-based). The difference is subtle, I suppose, but could have a dramatic effect on what the studies show — or maybe not, I don't know. The key takeaway here is that I've never been able to find a UBI study to contrast the numerous GBI studies I am familiar with against. You spoke of UBI studies so I was hoping you'd be able to share. But, it seems not.
I don't understand the questions you are asking at the end. Apologies for not having a good answer.
My point was in response to the parent "there's a lot of things that need to change before we get to Star Trek Federation economy", I pointed out that we have done trials on UBI that seemed to work, maybe we should try that.
I was wondering if your correction from UBI to GBI changes that point; these trials seem to work and solve at least part of the problem that this whole thread discusses, so maybe we should try that at a national scale. Does GBI invalidate that?
The question asked which UBI studies you were talking about in order to close my gap in being unable to find any. It is clear now that they don't exist, which is fine, but a bit disappointing as I would have loved to see them. There are GBI studies abound, but it seems nobody is willing to try UBI.
I hadn't gone that deeply into the studies to work out the exact thing they were testing.
The core thing that the studies have proven, I understand, is that if you guarantee people a basic living income, they don't sit around doing drugs and watching TV (or at least not for long). Which is usually the main objection from naysayers - the Theory X hypothesis that people are lazy and must be forced to do anything useful. And this is the thing that is disproved by these studies.
You seem more familiar with them, though, is that your reading too?
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