Not overrepresented enough given that middle America has disproportionate per capita voting power

It's not just middle america. It's the entire economy that deals in things first and numbers and ideas second.

Damaging structural parts on any modern car is likely to total it, just because of the labour costs involved.

> To make matters worse, labor unions are equally politically inactive, and most often their only political moves are endorsing candidates.

This isn’t true, UAW almost got Biden to transfer wealth directly from taxpayers to them via the union made EV credit bonus, laundered through government motors

Perhaps it was accidentally stumbling into good policy, but we all know western leaders would not be brave enough to do such a thing. The result of encouraging homeownership ideologically in the postwar era is that the west has a gigantic voting bloc of landowners who just want number go up.

> Perhaps it was accidentally stumbling into good policy

> we all know western leaders would not be brave enough to do such a thing

Do you need bravery to accidentally stumble into good policy?

“Cruise” is still churning out good tech, they gave a talk recently about using a lightweight [1] type of planner to train an end to end VLA style planner

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.03349

Too bad the rest of the world is no longer in shambles due to war and has other options than buying American

Why shouldn’t we try our best to make sure only net positives get in, and make sure they can’t bring net negatives with them?

To avoid losing the context of my previous comment in this chain, here is the relevant excerpt:

> I don't think it makes sense to have an immigration system based solely on "high skill", because not every member of a family should have to be "high skill" for the entire family to move to the US.

Now moving on to what you said:

> Why shouldn't we try our best to make sure only net positives get in, and make sure they can't bring net negatives with them?

Making prospective will-work-as-a-condition-of-immigration human beings who provide for their families choose between

(1) staying outside of the US,

(2) sending their families better income from the US only to eventually leave the US and return to worse job opportunities, or

(3) sending their families better income from the US while resigned to live permanently separately from their families (semantics note: vacationing to visit one's family on the rare occasions when one can afford to do so does not count as "living temporarily with your family")

is inhumane: a nation should not permanently hold continued legal immigration status hostage to require will-work-as-a-condition-of-immigration human beings to undergo the potential mental, emotional, and social suffering of being physically apart from their families. There should be at least one additional option:

(4) having to work for a capped, meaningfully finite duration of time before one's family members can immigrate without being forced to take the will-work-as-a-condition-of-immigration pathway.

How is it “inhumane?” People who don’t want to leave their families behind, especially extended families, can simply choose not to immigrate. It’s not “inhumane” to make people stay in their own countries.

We could have a long term dependent visa that permanently renders them ineligible for government assistance

Deindustrialization has hollowed out most American cities outside of major cities, and the corresponding anti globalism tantrum contributed to the current political situation. Because of the apportionment of House and Senate seats, these people hold most Americans hostage with their disproportionate voting power, and paying a ransom seems better than the alternative we are living through.

Nope. Globalism has made America richer than pretty much any nation in the existence of human history.

The election of leaders who prioritize the distribution of wealth from the poorest to the richest rather than vice versa has hollowed out rural America.

And rural America disproportionately votes for such leaders.

Technically you're not wrong, but without globalization, deindustrialization wouldn't have happened and unions (and strike threats) would probably be strong enough to prevent the poor to rich redistribution.

So even if globalization made America richer on average, it also destroyed the fair redistribution mechanism.

For absolutely not a single benefit to the owner but massive benefit to society.

It’s only theoretically non searchable, IIRC each submitted document has to be OCRed every time a search is ran on the documents, and this is enough of a legal fig leaf to qualify it as not a registry. A sizeable GPU farm would make this basically a moot point.

Oh I agree. It is very likely that the electronic checks are recorded and could be used as a non-official registry of gun owners. I removed my comment to that effect because it is speculation. But, electronic records are so easily recorded that I have little doubt that the electronic checks are in fact an illegal registry.

I could go on a whole tirade about how policing should not scale with technology, Katz v. USA was decided when surveillance had to be done with still images and film cameras, but the horse left the barn long ago and nobody really gives a shit about the constitution anymore.

can the police not use a found weapon's serial number to determine its owner? how can they do that if there's no registry with that info?

Seven states have required gun registries. It is not illegal for a state to have a registry. It is illegal for the federal government to have a gun registry with exceptions for NFA controlled arms.

https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12057