US Election 2016

[Z-Man]

I actually agree mostly with your full post

So you agree that the video that they claimed showed fraud did not show fraud? And no, neither they nor you get to redefine what 'fraud' means after the fact.

And to reiterate this very important point: Having a social security number does not mean you freeload on the system. It also means you can have a job and pay into the system. And it's a solidarity system. Stronger members contribute more than they take out, weaker members take more out. Even if the non-citizens take more out, it still would be within the design of the system; but the DOGE bros don't even demonstrate that.

So, how many of these murderers you are worried about have been found in the asylum seeker system? Because some of them should have been found out after a while, right? Apparently, there are background checks. I'm not interested in people who become murderers after they enter the system (those exist, obviously), only people who were murderers before already.

And well, for asylum seekers, you have to either provide for them (housing, pocket money, or just plain money) or you have to let them work. Especially if there are long wait times. And yes, that is a problem! Throw more judges and pencil pushers at it.

[kyle]

So you agree that the video that they claimed showed fraud did not show fraud? And no, neither they nor you get to redefine what 'fraud' means after the fact.

I think my post said the flaws, when you insentience coming here for "asylum" and you can't have a court date to be granted asylum for multiple years, but you can still get the benefits of being in need of asylum for multiple years, without needing to prove it, it's a very attractive offer to come here, and migrants are taking advantage of it.

Like i said that time needs to be reduced, because then it won't be nearly as attractive to come here as an asylum seeker, if you are just coming here to exploit the system.


Lucifer, or Sinewav, care to explain who was paying for the rooms in the Roosevelt hotel in new York?

The Roosevelt Hotel, owned by Pakistan International Airlines (PIA), was leased by the New York City government starting in May 2023 to serve as an "asylum-seeker arrival center." The city signed a three-year contract with PIA to use all 1,025 rooms to house migrants, reportedly at a rate of $210 per room per night. This deal was projected to generate up to $220 million in revenue for PIA over the three years. The funding for this lease came primarily from New York City taxpayers, as the city administration, under Mayor Eric Adams, managed the migrant crisis response. The money paid to PIA effectively went to the Pakistani government, given PIA’s state-owned status.
Additionally, there’s mention of federal involvement. In early 2025, it was reported that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had sent $59 million to luxury hotels in NYC, including the Roosevelt, to cover migrant housing costs, though this payment later became a point of contention under the Trump administration, with efforts to claw it back. However, the bulk of the funding—specifically the $220 million lease agreement—originated from the city’s budget, not a direct federal program.
So, in short, New York City taxpayers, via the city government, were the primary ones paying for the Roosevelt Hotel rooms during its time as a migrant shelter, with some federal funds also implicated but later disputed. The hotel ceased operating as a migrant shelter by June 2025, as announced by Mayor Adams, due to a decline in migrant arrivals.

And to reiterate this very important point: Having a social security number does not mean you freeload on the system. It also means you can have a job and pay into the system. And it's a solidarity system. Stronger members contribute more than they take out, weaker members take more out. Even if the non-citizens take more out, it still would be within the design of the system; but the DOGE bros don't even demonstrate that.

In a way correct, you can still have a Social security number and not work, I could have some chronic condition, and sign up for Medicaid. once on it, you basically get free healthcare, at the expense of other people, leading to inflation for healthcare. Not to mention them being here right after the biggest supply shock in history, needing to produce more basic necessities for everyone in the US, continues the inflation we saw for much longer. there not to blame for all, but some of it for sure.

[Z-Man]

You're worried an awful lot about the poorest of the poor potentially exploiting the system while being OK with corporations taking every tax loophole they possibly can, maybe you listened too much to this guy?

(Denis Lushch)

So you agree that the video that they claimed showed fraud did not show fraud? And no, neither they nor you get to redefine what 'fraud' means after the fact.

I think my post said the flaws

Not what I mean. Of course the system has flaws, every system has. I mean the LIE that they found fraud. I specifically asked whether fraud was found, you gave me the video as a response where they claim to have found fraud. They may have found things they don't like (and I'm using the word 'found' very liberally here, they would not have had to seize control of the database for that), but not a single bit of actual fraud. So it is evident they lied.
And you posted that lie here. The question I have is: Did you believe the lie and pass it on in good faith, or did you see it was a lie, and passed in on because you thought it would be convincing anyway?

Like i said that time needs to be reduced,

And I agree, for totally different reasons. Imagine someone in actual need for protection, and they come to a country where they may receive asylum. But for years, your case is in limbo, waiting for a decision. So for years, you don't know whether you actually get the protection you need or whether you are sent back, left to suffer whatever fate you fled from.

About the hotel thing, I'm not familiar with that particular case and don't want to familiarize myself with it, but for our asylum seekers here, there is similar fake outrage about them being put into hotels. Your imagination probably thinks that asylum seekers in a hotel are treated like regular hotel guests, with room service and hot meals three times a day. That is not the case. In Germany, when a hotel is used to house asylum seekers, it is because the hotel is currently shut down, for one reason or the other, maybe it is not profitable to run it anymore. The state just rents the building. The inhabitants have to clean their rooms themselves, and they don't get luxury food from the kitchen. When a rented hotel is used to house asylum seekers, it is because that is the cheaper option compared to the alternatives; renting anything else, building a temporary shelter, whatever. And, well, yes, you have to provide them with basic housing or let them work (we chose to no allow them to work, for whatever reason).
I suspect your hotel case would be the same. Closer inspection would reveal that whatever the alternatives were to the chosen solution, they would have cost more. Of course, I would never rule out the possibility of corruption.

And to reiterate this very important point: Having a social security number does not mean you freeload on the system. It also means you can have a job and pay into the system. And it's a solidarity system. Stronger members contribute more than they take out, weaker members take more out. Even if the non-citizens take more out, it still would be within the design of the system; but the DOGE bros don't even demonstrate that.

In a way correct, you can still have a Social security number and not work, I could have some chronic condition, and sign up for Medicaid. once on it, you basically get free healthcare, at the expense of other people, leading to inflation for healthcare.

What is the person with a chronic condition going to do otherwise? Pay horrendous bills for treatment of something that was not their fault? Or curl up and die? What you describe here is a solidarity based healthcare system working as intended, not an exploit. Now, of course, being against such a system is a perfectly valid position. Inhumane, but valid.

Let me tell you something about chronic diseases. Right, I wrote about this before, Z-Girl has a chronic disease, Cystic Fibrosis. It is hereditary, just bad luck in the genetic lottery. (In that bad luck pot, she is relatively lucky in that she has a combination of genes that makes it not that bad). Here is what different levels of treatment give you (all very rough numbers):

• No treatment at all: Life expectancy well below ten years.
• Next to no cost treatment (a special diet, special exercise): Maybe you make it to 20.
• Basic treatment (vitamins and enzymes that help you digest fats, which your body cannot digest naturally, inhalation with a salt solution): Cost 100 Euro/Month, it gets your life expectancy up to the mid thirties. That level should be a no-brainer.
• Advanced treatment (inhalation with slime dissolving enzymes): Cost 1.000 Euro/month, gets you to the mid fifties. We could and would afford that if we had to pay ourselves.
• State-of-the-art treatment is with so-called modulators, these are drugs that go into the cells where the genes produce the wrong protein and fix it up. These are new and still under patent and cost well above 10.000 Euro/month. Because they are so new, there is no telling what they do, but every expectation is that they get you close to a normal lifespan, and more importantly, a long life in good health.
• In the future, one can expect gene therapy. Just crispr/cas9 the bad genes away and replace them with good ones. If existing gene therapies are any indication, the expected price is millions per treatment, and you need two or three rounds; but the hope is that that would fix you up for good.

No way we, or any normal person, could afford the state-of-the-art therapy.

However, we live in a country with a solidarity based healthcare system. So all of the above is paid. No questions asked. No shaming, nobody is blaming her for taking so much out of the system. Because it wasn't her fault to be born that way. Because in a solidarity based system, the high cost for individuals get spread out among many shoulders. You have to multiply them by the prevalence, about 1 in 3000 born in this case, which means the 10.000 Euro/month mean it's a cost of 3.33 Euro/month for everyone to allow an unfortunate few a chance to a normal life. I mean, the system also swallows the much higher, entirely avoidable, healthcare costs of smoking.

Now, whether drugs should be allowed to be that expensive is a whole different can of worms. In this case, legally, the modulators can be as expensive as their manufacturer wants because they are protected by patents. production costs are way lower. However, drug research is expensive AF, and only a tiny portion of started research leads to a marketable product in the end. It is a very costly lottery, and if we take away the chance for a jackpot, less research would be done.

[sinewav]

it's a very attractive offer to come here, and migrants are taking advantage of it.

Kyle, they were coming anyway, regardless of the asylum policy.

ou basically get free healthcare, at the expense of other people, leading to inflation for healthcare.

The healthcare inflation is because we have a cruel, for-profit system. Medicaid is supposed to be non-profit, but it has mostly been sold out to corporations. This idea that we shouldn't help anyone in need really makes me thing you are a terrible, terrible person. Like, it actually makes me sick that people think this way. I really don't care that an asylum seeker gets sick and my tax dollars pay to help them get better. I definitely care that my tax dollars are used to bomb little kids in the Middle East. Sorry, those are my leftist principals.

Regarding the Roosevelt Hotel, you should be angry that our government made a private company rich instead of investing in public infrastructure to help people, which would have been cheaper.

[Word]

I could have some chronic condition, and sign up for Medicaid. once on it, you basically get free healthcare, at the expense of other people, leading to inflation for healthcare. Not to mention them being here right after the biggest supply shock in history,

I want to add a little to this from my perspective. I have a chronic condition and a job and I pay about 50% of my insurance, the other 50% is paid by my boss. That means when I go to the doctor or buy medicine it's usually low-cost, but I still have to pay some fraction of the actual price in cash. Again, I pay my insurance, other people pay theirs, I can buy medicine regularly, so can they when they need it. That's it. I'm thankful the system over here works the way it does. Healthcare is never completely free for the average citizen, even if I'd argue it should be, and in reality it's even more expensive for poor foreigners who aren't part of the system yet. There's a social contract: You pay for your elderly and those in need, the younger generation will pay for you once you're old and need even more medical attention than you do now. The future demographic change will make this harder, because we have more old people than young ones who are able to work. This means we need more young people from outside. It's the same in most Western economies. I'm pretty sure most people that benefit from our healthcare system also at one point paid into it or will pay into it, so the ones who really never paid anything are a very small minority that the rest of us can easily take care of.

So let's go back to tariffs for a bit. You have a problem with people benefitting from Medicaid when not all of them pay into the system. And then the guy you put in charge tries to tax other countries and uninhabited islands when they don't buy all your stuff because they have their own finances, laws and regulations and so on? Isn't that a little gross? If you apply your protectionist logic everywhere, shouldn't you pay for your own economy then instead of forcing others to buy your expensive products, e.g. cars that may be beautifully designed but just don't fit on our streets because they are too large (we have our own car industry in Europe by the way)? I hope the point i'm trying to make is clear, I'm not very pro-capitalist or pro-car, but if I was, then I'd start to produce European-style cars in the US that beat the European competition instead of killing the entire continental car trade. Literally everyone will suffer from this crap, except some Wall Street guys who betted on a recession early enough.

[Lucifer]

Here's john Oliver drinking baby blood. Actually, he's taking a deep dive into transgender athletes.

https://youtu.be/flSS1tjoxf0?si=CGzeHzrtwGod9TmK

[Monkey]

So let's go back to tariffs for a bit......Literally everyone will suffer from this crap, except some Wall Street guys who betted on a recession early enough.

This is it, although I think it's the American people, rather than the rest of the World, who will suffer; while Trump/Musk/Wall Street guys get/stay rich, most other Americans are going to be screwed by these tariffs. The MAGAs incorrectly believe that other countries can't function without the US. Wrong. Europe, Canada, China, etc will do (and in fact already are doing) more business with each other instead. Especially China is far more efficient and capable than most Americans realise. Their cars are approaching EU standard already and, in the near future, will no doubt surpass said standard, while at the same time being cheaper. Also, the fact that Trump et al are seriously pissing off the Middle East won't help the US either. The US is fast heading to become a third world country.

[Word]

although I think it's the American people, rather than the rest of the World, who will suffer

In a "total" comparison, maybe, but since a big chunk of our economy depends on export to the US and other countries, that tariff policy, if escalated even further, will destroy lots of jobs over here too. There are third-world countries which already have to deal with the effects of climate change/droughts etc., which will be hit even worse and can neither retaliate/afford to "negotiate" (paying up) their way out of this. This means they'll likely look for help from China, Russia and perhaps the EU.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... r-mandalay

[Z-Man]

Here are two different nerds explaining the administration's Tariff logic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j04IAbWCszg
https://xkcd.com/3073/
Spoiler: It's BS.

[Lucifer]

Here are two different nerds explaining the administration's Tariff logic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j04IAbWCszg
https://xkcd.com/3073/
Spoiler: It's BS.

I love Matt Parker. I thought about linking that video here.

[Z-Man]

It's even worse. (You know, Matt Parker is a good communicator, but not the best mathematician and a very lousy programmer) And also, there is a twist, just wait...
Even given their premise, the formula is wrong. They forget to take into account that if passthrough PHI is < 1, which they assume is the case, the exporter swallows parts of the tariff and what actually matters, how much the USA pay the other country for the exports, goes down. That is the actual export income of the other country, the tariffs stay entirely in the USA.

So really, when you import N number of goods at price P each from a foreign county and you apply additional (always assumed to be small so we stay in the regime where linear approximation is valid) tariffs DELTA _AU,
a) the domestic price for consumers rises to P' = P * (1 + PHI * DELTA_TAU)
b) the import price paid to the foreign country falls to P'' = P * (1 + (PHI - 1) * DELTA_TAU), because someone has to pay the tariff P * DELTA TAU (again, DELTA_TAU being small, so we don't have to worry what the tariff is relative to)
c) in response to the domestic price change of P * PHI * DELTA_TAU, demand drops from N to N' = N * (1 + EPSILON * PHI * DELTA_TAU)
(I'm going with negative epsilon as the paper suggests)
What you pay the other county is M = P * N, that then changes to M' = P'' * N' = M * (1 + (PHI - 1) DELTA_TAU) (1 + EPSILON * PHI * DELTA_TAU), which is approximately (small DELTA TAU, remember) X * (1 + (PHI - 1) DELTA_TAU + EPSILON * PHI * DELTA_TAU) = M * ( 1 + DELTA_TAU * (PHI * (1 + EPSILON) - 1))

Or DELTA_M = M * DELTA_TAU * (PHI * (1 + EPSILON) - 1)

They want DELTA_M to be X - M.

Their formula turns correct for PHI = 1, total passtrhough, if the entirety of the tariff is passed on to the consumer. That's not what they assume, though.

Ok, here is the twist. Trump says that prices will not rise. Mathematically, he says PHI is zero. Now, put that into the equation and you simply get
X - M = DELTA_M = -M * DELTA_TAU or solved for DELTA_TAU
DELTA_TAU = (M - X)/M
Which is what they used, given that they assumed ad hoc that EPSION * TAU = -1. And you can, of course, simply work out directly: Assuming tariffs don't cause prices to rise and that the exporting country swallows them totally, the suggested "reciprocal" tariffs would precisely achieve their goal of establishing trade balance.
So, mathematically, given that assumption, TRUMP IS RIGHT.

And, and, if we do set PHI to 1/4 and EPSILON to 4, we get
DELTA_M = M * DELTA_TAU * (1/4 * (1 - 4) - 1) = - M * DELTA_TAU * 7/4
or DELTA_TAU = 4 (M - X)/(7 M)
which is dangerously close to the ad hoc factor of 1/2 they slapped on to divine the actual tariffs they were going to impose on the various countries (sans the 10% minimum)
So, again mathematically, given their assumptions, THE TARIFFS THEY DETERMINED ACTUALLY WOULD ACHIEVE THEIR GOAL.

Of course, both assumptions can't be correct at the same time, and the goals are still bonkers, and they neglect to tell you that still, N' = N + EPSILON * PHI * DELTA_TAU, and I remind you that EPSILON is still negative. Remember what N was? It's the stuff you get. That is Math saying "You will get less stuff".

I'll be curiously watching the price for, specifically, the Switch 2. They already announced it at 450$ (500$ with bundled game), but said this was pre-tariff (and even then, a massive price hike since last gen), and they need to think about what they'll do. That's why everyone but the USA can preorder the things now.

[Lucifer]

(You know, Matt Parker is a good communicator, but not the best mathematician and a very lousy programmer)

Yeah, and he can drone on a bit at times, but most of his videos are pretty decent. Him and Adam Savage building dodecahedrons is just pure wholesome joy.

[Z-Man]

I think my favorite Matt Parker video is where he visits the sadly decaying Math themed playground in Japan with the Klein Bottle climbing structure: https://youtu.be/SYBRxqEE4XQ?si=ME1lyKd-Sqg8RyUk
And of course his crusade against mathematically impossible soccer street signs. I have the T-Shirt of that. I don't dare to wear it on all days, because we live next to the soccer stadium and the text on it is in English and the picture just looks like I don't like soccer, and I don't want to put myself into the situation where I have to explain a math joke to a drunken fan.
I also have the utilities puzzle mug, because of course I have.