I see no reason that professionals shouldn’t be allowed to make money off of their profession. There are some opportunities for some perverse incentives in any industry, but that’s why licensing and ethics boards exist.

Wow his platform is pretty damn solid. https://www.dylanforillinois.com/issues

It’s easy to turn a blind eye when things are going well in your personal life. It’s the central theme of “They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45”

Yeah the places known for chocolate are rarely places that can grow coco.

Above I provided some research into this debate. It didn’t have any information on people “obviously not educating themselves”. Would you be able to cite some research?

I am a mod here and this comment was reported for Nazi rhetoric.

While I’m certainly sorry to see anti-immigration sentiment I would rather show a realistic perspective of immigration. It’s easy to see that immigration is a positive for the host county and for the world, especially for refugees.

Thankfully Sweden seems to have a generally healthy perspective on welfare and immigration.

Here is an interesting meta study on research into the Swedish immigration debate.

In the most direct measurement, the immigrant populations that take the longest time make net positive tax contribution are refugees.

The low employment rate among refugees in their first years in the host country means that average incomes were low in these years. Although incomes grew steadily as the years passed, it took almost 20 years for the average refugee in Sweden to make a positive annual net contribution to public finances. The simple explanation for this is that a larger proportion of migrants have been active in sectors that are socially necessary but low paid, in service occupations such as healthcare, transport, restaurants, and so on (Frödin & Kjellberg, Citation2018).

I hope Swedish people feel pride in the refugees they are able to host. It’s impressive that despite refugees working a lot of jobs that are needed for society to function (letting other high tax payers have nice lives) but are low pay, they are still able to become net contributors to public finances in 20 years.

The paper points out how integrating immigrants into the workforce quickly is important but that can be challenging because refugees often come in influxes.

And education is a big part of finding work:

And in conclusion it says:

With this as a central point of departure, an aging population is considered by far the most important motivation for increasing immigration. From this perspective, migration can be justified both from a short-term perspective, as its net contribution to the public finances can be crucial for the financing of welfare, and from a long-term perspective, as it can have clearly positive effects on the supply of labour. This is mainly for demographic reasons as the vast majority of migrants are of young working age. Among migrant groups, two categories are clearly favourable to government finances: highly educated migrants and labour migrants. Objections are often raised to the third category – refugee immigrants – who are argued to have high introduction costs, mainly in the initial years of residence.

A one-sided focus on the average cost burden of refugee migrants that only compares their costs during the years of stay in Sweden with the costs of the native population during the same period is highly misleading. Such a comparison ignores the extensive costs to which comprehensive welfare systems are exposed. For the Swedish welfare system, with its generous benefits and welfare services, life cycle welfare expenditure includes a social safety net during childhood and adolescence. This provides a more comparable picture of migrants’ actual burden on welfare programmes in relation to citizens covered by social protection from ‘the cradle to the grave’. The significant number of refugees who migrate as adults imposes no costs at all on the public finances of the host country during these years. Thus, if their costs to the welfare system are related to their age, the average total cost burden on the welfare system will be significantly lower than that of the native population.

In sum, and as Scocco and Andersson (Citation2015) and Ruist (Citation2019) note, the effects of immigration on the economy are exaggerated in the political debate. The growing opposition to immigration can be explained by the failure of the political establishment to implement the rapid inclusion of newly arrived migrants into the labour market. The literature on the impacts of migration does not find any trends that could seriously threaten the sustainability of welfare states. Modern welfare states do not experience any dramatic economic problems due to immigration. In economic terms, immigration can affect central government finances by a few percentage points, plus or minus, depending on the success of the employment policy and whether the labour market succeeds in quickly absorbing new migrants, but can by no means be considered a threat to financial stability.

It’s the last hurrah of advertising. It’s probably a good place to advertise a VPN.

If you define ‘need’ very loosely then the statement becomes pretty meaningless but I agree with it.

Otherwise there are many scenarios where I disagree with it.

There is lots of valuable talking that happens that doesn’t strictly need to be said.

Small talk is important for relationships.

Anyone learning a language needs to talk a lot just for the sake of talking. Even if nothing needs to be said.

Sometimes people need to be and feel heard to feel welcome in a group. It’s easy to say that the content of the conversation isn’t nearly as important as the act of having the conversation.

Happy cake day!

3. if you lose the game you must announce “I just lost the game”

… at least that was one of the rules we played by

Keep pushing y’all, you got this.

Maybe this is a dumb question but what does a sock processing facility do?

Yeah, AI is kinda like the monkey’s paw.

This is interesting. It’s certainly risky to have it so centralized.

Italys got hands!

Your comment was in a different thread. I did remove your comment. I didn’t nuke that thread.