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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • But outsourcing them to an collection of independent bureaucracies(companies) is so much more ‘efficient’ than one bureaucracy just building what it needs to.

    Besides, the government owning and developing housing would just be a huge cost to the taxpayers given how unprofitable it is to own or sell real-estate. Why the government might even build enough to actually house all the people waiting on public housing and then rent out the surplus out at below market rates but above cost in order to help fund the service, and that sounds like it could cut into the profit margins of the poor landlords.

    Nope, far better to make a deal where the government assumes the risk for the project if a project fails, and the corporations get to take all the extra profit if a project succeeds./s



  • So that’s the one option then, and it’s a good option that a lot of Sunni Syrians (who are not subject to the same religious persecution as converts) take, and as such 30% of the entire nation are refugees or migrants from Palestine and Syria.

    Naturally a small desert country, the influx has caused significant strain on the nations water infrastructure, and with a small economy, limited resources, and limited capital, Jordan is forced to sacrifice 6% of the entire nations GDP on the refugee program. Also worth noting that said national GDP is smaller than just the Norwegian government budget.

    This on top of an already struggling economy, and the fact the nation is dependent on buying foreign food, and the limits placed on foreign dept by international creditors, the nation has been forced to undertake an extreme austerity program in order to prevent mass famine, which has of course further limited economic growth.

    As such not only are people fleeing religious prosecution going to find similar prosecution in Jordan, but the nation is struggling hard to feed its own people and is in no position to take everyone even if it wanted to. As a result it has increasingly turned refugees away, and heavily pushes for non Sunni refugees to go to places where they will actually be safe.

    Since most people arn’t dumb, many take said advice and travel to a nation where they will actually be safe, you know, the whole point of the asylum system.

    The whole reason it needs to be a wealthy land is because the land needs to actually be able to support the refugees for them to all actually be able to go there without trapping the host nation in a cycle of poverty.

    So now that you, as a non Sunni refugee, have been rejected from Jordan, what’s you next suggestion for the nearest safe nation?

    And again I must ask the basic question, why are poor nations expected to sacrifice so much so that the rich ones can do absolutely nothing?

    edit: Or on second thought don’t, this conversation has already drifted so far from the actual subject of border security methods, and going nowhere if I have to explain the baisc idea of why the rich might have to help the poor or why border crossings between unsafe nations might be harder than a road trip within a single nation.

    Going down the list of nations within two hops of Syria and explaining why each in turn may be unsafe for you or turn you away is also going to be exhausting and you can just google it.


  • Given that it’s takes months of work to cross a border for a refugee but it’s only a three day drive from Sochi to the Norwegian border, yes, the number of borders absolutely matters more than physical distance.

    Show me where in article 14 it says that this right only applies the geographically closest nation and all others are except.

    Or, because you keep insisting that there are so very many safe nations with unlimited resources and food for people to wait out the collapse Russia and its puppets with only one nation between them and Syria, list them.

    Note, these nations must not be a theocracy or limit the freedom of religion, not currently be at war, have an effective refuge program that does not limit the number of entrants, and of course not be in need of significant international aid themselves.


  • Again, Norway is actually very close at just two nations away, one of which has regular race riots and has still taken in literally millions of refugees, while the other is the one that installed the regime persecuting them and is fucking Russia.

    Most of the nations that are closer are either filled with religious persecution, so impoverished as to require vast amounts of western food aid just to feed their own people, or are already taking in orders of magnitude more refugees than Norway.

    Why should the aid a nation provides the international community be based solely on geographical proximity? Does this mean that Norway should also not provide any aid to Ukraine, as it is also geographically far away? Why should it only the the poor nations that should do their part to take in people in distress and not the rich?

    When so much of the world is impoverished and struggling to survive itself, why is it so ‘suspicious’ that when people are forced to start over from scratch they might try and do so in the lands of over abundance and where their children don’t have to worry about being beaten to death by a mob or living in Putin’s Russia?



  • Um, so let’s think about this. Why are people fleeing the Russian military and its operations to secure the power of its chosen allies in Syria not rushing to seek asylum in the country that blew up their homes in the first place? I mean Russia is obviously such a great nation to live in, with its very high standards of living and no possibility of being forced to either join the Russian military or being handed over to the very regime you are claiming asylum from.

    I also didn’t realize that Türkiye and Russia, the two nations between Syra and Norway, represented ‘the whole of Europe and large parts of the Middle East and North Africa’.

    I guess the one poor country already hosting 3.2million refugees is handling it very well, as there have been absolutely no race riots, violence, or mass deportations back to Syria, and we should expect every single refugee to stay there instead of attempting to make a claim in any other nation.

    I also missed that line in the UN declaration of human rights that says you can ignore applying these rights to people if the Russians are also being dicks to them. /s


  • I thought you just said the issue the government needed to solve was random people wandering across the border without realizing it. People crossing or being trafficked across Russia in an attempt to exercise their right as a human being under article 14 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, an agreement specifically drafted with the goal of facilitating large movements of persecuted people in the wake of nations turning away people fleeing the Holocaust, well those people are either trying to find and be collected by the border agents or being trafficked and falsely terrified they’ll be sent back to horrific abuse if their discovered by the border patrol instead of welcomed in, so why would a fence change anything about the number of them trying to get out of a dangerous foreign nation?

    I mean it’s not like Norway would be trying to discourage them from holding it to the obligations the nation signed and agreed to that require it to thoughtfully and thoughly analyze each of their claims in court, now would it? I mean if they don’t have even proper shoes, Norway is of course going to spare no expense in welcoming as many of them as show up as quickly as possible, and as such undercutting human trafficking by showing how easy and risk free the alternative is, right?

    It apparently has all this extra money to spend on a changing a border system that is currently working very well in your own words.

    Also, you realize we are talking about a press release about the Norwegian government considering future fencing of more of the Russian-Norwegian border, and not the system as it exists currently, right?

    And that this boarder fencing functionality requires a nice, level, drivable trail to be cleared through the wilderness either side of it to be built and maintained, right?



  • Neglecting the silliness of assuming that we were talking about where the road crosses the border, or alternatively showing a map where the Russian road parallels the border for sections and where not a single part of the border is more than 10km from the Russian road while meaning it to show that no vehicle could even drive near to the border much reach it, surely what you said about the guards always knowing when someone is coming from kilometers away and being ready to meet them makes the case for a fence over the whole length worse, as it is evidently is and has not been needed for that purpose?

    I guess it is nice though that the issue is just Norway considering spending a lot of money to help solve the issue of lost Russian tourists instead of trying to solve any security concerns.



  • Again, fences are like cheap locks, they are creating a social barrier to tell people not to pass, not a way of significantly reducing the speed at which someone who wants to will take in doing so.

    How many seconds do you think it takes a truck to drive through one, or someone to hop out of a truck to prop a ladder up against one? What else could be built or funded with the cost of building these expensive signs?

    If your going to spend massive amounts of money on securing a border, at least spend it on the things that actually have an impact, like more patrols and guard posts, not on more extensive signposting.



  • As the traditional saying goes, show me a five meter high fence, and i’ll show you a six meter high ladder.

    More seriously, if you want to catch people at the border, you do mainly just need to have cameras, sensors, and people monitoring it, and you then just need to send some guards out in a truck to go out and talk to the things that walk through it.

    If their arn’t guards, then there is nothing to stop anyone with bolt cutters or a cutting tool coming along and getting through, or as the US found out, coming along and stealing parts of the unguarded fence in the middle of nowhere whenever the price for scrap metal got high enough to be worth the trip.

    The only problems with this approach of just sending guards out is that it doesn’t look as imposing in stock footage, and that it’s harder to deny people a chance at the universal human right of asylum if they’ve set foot on your territory and you have to talk to them and escort them back instead of pushing them away from a fence with your fingers in your ears saying I can’t hear you.




  • Why should I be afraid of a foreign company learning my information, and instead trust a local one that proudly sells it on the open market to anyone that wants it?

    This proposal puts no fetters on what information amarican companies gather or sell to the Chinese.

    And yes, the largest nation in the world definitely stole all their technology, all thouse technology transfer agreements, companies outsourcing their manufacturing lines to it, and of course the hundreds of billions it’s government poured into the R&D of new energy technologies at a time when most western countries were slashing or eliminating their own subsidies and investments had nothing to do with it. Nope, none at all./s

    Don’t get me wrong, fuck the CCP. They are authoritarian imperialists who constantly cultivate racism and xenophobia while openly punishing anyone who speaks out against them, and are far, far more interested in protecting the power of the party’s leadership than even appearing to try and appear actually left wing, but this does nothing to protect american consumers.

    The only practical effect is to shield amarican manufacturers from competition with companies that have not colluded to focus exclusively on the largest, highest profit gas guzzlers they could fit on the roads during the last two decades the instant it looked like their customers might actually have had an option but to bend over and take it.

    Chrysler and GM could have focused their efforts on building cheaper EVs instead of half assing compliance cars and then selling them for enough to ensure that sales would never get big enough to divert manufacturering lines from their high profit margin Trucks and SUVs, but instead actually chose not to.

    Now the government is actively protecting them from competition on a thin pretense, and say it with me now, we know it’s a thin pretense because the government has no problem with Amarican, european, Japanese, and Korean companies doing the literal same exact thing and then selling the same recordings to the Chinese government.

    If the government was actually even the slightest bit concerned about amarican car buyers privacy, it would not allow a company like Tesla where employees regularly pass around clip compilations of the funniest things they’ve seen on the car’s internal cameras to have cellular modems, internal cameras, or over the air updates.

    Instead it says if you want a car with bluetooth speakers or over the air security updates, you must buy the land yacht from the good amarican company that just donated to our campaign and is making a killing on the margin shortly after it looked like even a hundred percent tariff might not be enough to protect amarican car manufacturers from the consequence of their own direct choices.


  • Boy, it sure is a good thing that there is only risk from low cost Chinese vehicles, could you imagine if security researchers had been demonstrating that these theoretical attacks have actually been trivially done on American and european vehicles for decades now? Thankfully all other car companies are bastions of cybersecurity best practices, near impossible to hack or slip malicious code into via an over the air update.

    Also could you imagine if a Chinese company could spy on you directly and learn personal infomation though your vehicle, instead of buying that same information on the open market from a good american car company instead? The horror.

    It’s just a convenient coincidence that this comes at the same time as the american car industry risked actual competition with competitors that didn’t spend the last two decades building half assed compliance EVs while focusing on selling the public on the largest, highest markup truck and SUV that can still theoretically fit on the road.

    Ohh well, guess Amaricans are just going to have to pay three times as much for new vehicles than the rest of the world for vehicles with similar manufacturing costs, wouldn’t want to risk GM or Fords profit margins after all.

    I sure am glad that the government may not be willing to provide social housing without a five year wait list while you to live in a tent under the freeway and get all your worldly possessions, photos, and documents thrown out by police, but is always proactive about ensuring that billion dollar companies never have to worry about facing even the slightest consequence of their own active decisions to undermine the fight against climate change.

    Biggest /s possible.


  • I know BC at least solved this problem a few years ago by just legally requiring landlords to provide L2 chargers when asked and suddenly EVs were very popular with apartment owners.

    While L2 chargers are definitely the ideal for household charging, it’s worth noting for places with street parking and such that you absolutely can charge an EV overnight with an household outlet and an extension cord, At least you can if you’re not averageing more than 60 miles(100km) per day, and if you’re dependent on street parking you’re probably closer into town than that.

    Ideally the government would institute a similar must provide L2 if asked for employees at places with electric service, as that would ensure that they could not only get 170miles (290km) during a 9-5 shift, but allow for bidirectional charging to actually help with bulk grid storage, or at least incentivize charging at times when solar is plentiful instead of at night where you’re going to be drawing from a grid scale battery or hydro resivor.

    On the grid front, while electrification will require expansion of capacity, it is worth remembering that this is not a unprecedented surge in growth so much as a return to the normal rate of grid expansion after decades of austerity. Even in north america, with our sprawling suburbs built on long freeway car commutes, our average EV consumes less power than our average air conditioner does over the entire year.

    Admittedly optimizing for grid distribution means charging overnight though, when all the infrastructure that feed those hungry air conditioners during the day is siting around with unused capacity, so the optimal mix will depend on whether upgrading distribution infrastructure is more expensive than upgrading grid storage infrastructure and nighttime generating capacity.