People from my country who emigrate to the United States settle mostly in Chicago. As far as I know, according to official data they are about 120,000, but there may be many more. There are far fewer in other cities. I don’t know what attracts them to this city, but they say they feel it is closest to the climate and the way of life they are used to.
They have a thing for deep dish pizza and wind?
Well, those who live in the USA or have eaten pizzas even in the homeland of pizzas Italy say that our / Bulgarian / pizzas are much tastier. I don’t know about the wind, they didn’t complain. But here it is neither very rainy nor there are serious winds. There are, but it is normal for a temperate climate. There are also many of our immigrants in California and Florida, but most of them are not concentrated in one city, but are scattered throughout the state. They generally emigrate to these parts of the United States.
Did I say all control freaks are leftists? If so, I misspoke/typed.
Anyone north of the equator here is a control freak
Slight derail here:
I remember having a discussion in school (high school so accuracy is suspect) about the basic assumptions between people being inherently good or inherently evil. This was extrapolated out into a discussion of political leanings where if you believed people were inherently good, you would opt for a less restrictive government and the opposite if you thought people were inherently bad. This very top-down conversation in high school actually helped me understand a LOT about why I believe what I believe and why I vote the way I vote.
So really the question here is: Do you believe people are inherently good or inherently evil? The left/right alignment on this graph involves governmental control over the economy so it is unrelated (mostly) to the question.
Neither. We are inherently opportunists because nature programmed us for survival. Good and evil are mutable concepts we came up with to control behavior once we started building cities.
Let’s hope not… Nuclear option because a split would likely trigger a war of secession.
The breakup of several empires and what we’ve spoken of here, the breakup of the Balkans, examples of people who want to run things their own way.
Has there been the constant splintering that some here have spoken about because of perpetual disagreement of individual people?
@deyan I get your point. And while I’m certainly not an expert in history, I do know that in some cases people were forced or compelled to leave where they were. So perhaps in some almost-homogenous places in the USA, a new nation could be formed from an existing demographic and other, while the formation of others would be far more complicated. Plus there would likely be places that remain highly diverse. Like maybe the tri-state area would.
As said, I predict civil war in 50 years, and my prediction can be wrong. I don’t consider it to be a bad thing. It is simply the cycle of history. All empires die.
I believe there are many good people out there. There are also many nice people out there too. Yet as I said elsewhere, many of these people, good as they are, lack wisdom, intelligence, insight, and specialized knowledge, and support and condone dumb and dangerous things.
I’m not an expert on government. But I don’t look at it as something that should be more or less restrictive. I look at it something in which every policy should be judged on whether it maintains a viable social order.
No mass democracy either, for the aforesaid reason regarding lemmings. The notion that someone should have a say simply for existing for eighteen years or should have a say despite being of poor quality is ridiculous.
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Cue Neocon defense of mass democracy, and invocation of founding fathers’ unrealized(because of bad people, donchaknow) intent, in…
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So you are okay with actual inequalities bekng written into our voting laws? Or am i misunderstanding?
How many would give up their right to vote if it meant they wouldn’t have to pay taxes?
I think you’d like Ray Dalio’s latest book, Changing World Order.
On the topic… every time I’m reminded of this quote, I shudder to think where we are in this cycle.
“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage”
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Yes. I believe there should be qualification for voting, not simply reaching eighteen years of age, or at the least, not having everyone’s vote counted equally.
You’re a smart, perceptive, well-informed guy who supports himself, has a wife and kids, and pays attention to the world around him. Should a dumb, anti-social, criminal, and/or ill-informed person have the same voting power as you? If so, why? And if so, how do you not consider this dangerous?
I consider putting decision-making power in the hands of the masses to be dumb and dangerous, even if some are nice and good.
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Sounds like tyranny. You must be a leftist.
Yes, sure.
Similar to a poll tax. Much maligned, but sensible. Voters without skin in the game is one of the gravest moral hazards in all of democracy, as the mob can and wil use state force to redistribute funds from their neighbor to themselves.
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I’m going to look that up.
How does that work when the politicians are controlled by big donors who get more from the treasury than the voters? Wall Street is the symbol of the greatness of capitalism yet it had no problem getting bailouts. Did this guy ever hear of TARP?
I’d like to see the list of civilizations he picked because that number seems very low. And the majority of great civilizations were not democracies and liberty was limited.
Look at our expenditures. 60-65% of the Federal budget goes toward SS, Medicaid, and Medicare. Another trillion or so is spent on additional social spending of some sort. ~$700B goes to defense spending, much of which is gov’t pensions. Annualize and tack on inflation. The top 1% fund nearly all of this (if you look at tax payments less benefits). I would’ve let more firms go under during the last crash, but TARP was a pittance.
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