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Brian
9.1K posts
Brian
@bbalkus
Fellow at Roots of Progress and the Bull Moose Institute. Contributing writer at Arena Magazine.
San Clemente, CA Katılım Mayıs 2010
379 Takip Edilen1.6K Takipçiler
@swmckewonOWH I have lived in Omaha, Austin, and Orange County, CA and have a son that is just starting to play baseball and the numbers certainly seem right to me for CA/TX. Beyond travel teams, there is the private coaching and training centers.
orangecountybaseballlessons.com/coaches
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The dollar numbers seem higher than they are in the Midwest but the vibe seems accurate.
Lenore Skenazy@FreeRangeKids
Sandlot it ain't. Youth sports now $40 B industry: "Teenagers on travel teams are rolling into weekend tournaments wearing a few thousand dollars of apparel, equipment & swag. Avg family spending on baseball increased nearly 70% between 2019 and 2024." wsj.com/business/retai…
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@FilmGamerOne @CCknockout @business Secessionist in Alberta and Quebec have never needed any encouragement
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@bbalkus @CCknockout @business Famously America has never never had a history of foreign interference.
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Alberta Premier Danielle Smith says she’ll call a referendum on whether the energy-rich province should stay in Canada or start a legal process that could eventually lead to its independence bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
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@FilmGamerOne @CCknockout @business Famously Canada has never had a history of secessionist movements without U.S. involvement.
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@bbalkus @pmarca @washingtonpost I agree. But that doesn’t make them not German, because German ethno-national identity is compatible with American assimilation like English or Roman Catholic identity, and UNLIKE for example Pakistani or Congolese identity.
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@jrysana @pmarca @washingtonpost Yes, and the Germans from Operation Paperclip became American citizens, lived in the country for decades post WWII, and deliberately and enthusiastically assimilated into American culture so they could become “real Americans” in Von Braun’s words.
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@bbalkus @pmarca @washingtonpost Ethnicity =/= Nationality =/= Citizenship
If you pick up a Pakistani gang rapist from London at 3pm and give him an express American citizenship at 4pm, that doesn't make him "American".
You need to actually assimilate into American nationality to BE American.
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@jrysana @pmarca @washingtonpost I am part German by ethnicity and my wife has 100% German ancestry. I am not anti-German and I am not diminishing German contributions. I am putting them in their appropriate historical context.
American is not an ethnicity. Arnold Schwarzenegger is American as anyone.
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@bbalkus @pmarca @washingtonpost You're dodging my questions. Are you anti-immigration or anti-German or anti-Germanic? What is the motive for your diminishing of German contributions to America?
By the way, America is a nation not just a state. Being an American citizen does not make you American, it's deeper.
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@jrysana @pmarca @washingtonpost It wasn’t German nuclear bomb technology. JFC. Yes, Jewish German and Austrian refugees made significant contributions to the Manhattan Project, but the U.S. actually built the bomb. The Germans never came close.
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@bbalkus @pmarca @washingtonpost Of course the US victory in WWII was "due to Germany".
America defeated Japan with German nuclear bomb technology, and defeated Germany because Germany lost a winning war.
In any A v.s. B situation, it is true that an A victory was "due to" B as much as it was "due to" A.
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@cojobrien @pmarca @washingtonpost Yes, they were beneficial for America and I am not disputing that. But many people believe that the Operation Paperclip Germans were solely responsible for the Apollo Program’s technical achievements. I have had people respond to my post commenting as much.
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@bbalkus @pmarca @washingtonpost All Kustov is saying is that the Operation Paperclip arrivals were valuable and highly beneficial for America. Not that they were solely responsible for the Apollo program.
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@jrysana @pmarca @washingtonpost There are only Americans. If your great grandfather was born in Germany and you grew up in Kansas that doesn’t make you German. This is like claiming the U.S. victory in WWII was due to Germany because Eisenhower was the Supreme Allied Commander.
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@bbalkus @pmarca @washingtonpost I didn't make that claim, I'm here to interrogate your anti-German stance because it strikes me as malicious or misinformed.
But since you said it, it *is* a German achievement, as well as an American achievement, and primarily a Germanic American effort. Why do you deny that?
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They weren’t all German Americans and they were almost all born in America and lived their whole lives in America. Even the Paperclip Germans who worked on the program were American citizens (including Von Braun). What’s your motive to claim the Apollo Program as a German achievement?
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@bbalkus @pmarca @washingtonpost 400K largely Germanic Americans, Brian. Many more than a dozen of whom grew up in Germany. What's your point? What's your motive?
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@jrysana @pmarca @washingtonpost There were 400K Americans would worked on the Apollo program versus a few dozen mostly old German engineers who were in program and project management roles. The U.S. quickly became the best in the world in aerospace engineering post war.
palladiummag.com/2023/04/04/the…
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@bbalkus @pmarca @washingtonpost American *and German* engineers dramatically improved the original German designs over those 25 years. Not just "Americans", and those "Americans" were largely Germanic anyways, so again, what is your point?
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@jrysana @pmarca @washingtonpost The point of the operation was to gain access to German aerospace technology and accelerate American aerospace R&D, which it did. But American engineers dramatically improved German designs and the Saturn V launch was nearly 25 years after WWII.
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@bbalkus @pmarca @washingtonpost Yes it is. What's your point? What's your motive?
Obviously the Germans played a huge role. Otherwise why do the whole operation to begin with?
Even beyond that, likely 90%+ of the involved American-born engineers were of Germanic origin, many just a few generations prior.
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This is the myth that won’t die. Apollo was an American achievement.
Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸@pmarca
Rare pro-Nazi stance by the @washingtonpost. Brave.
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American engineers dramatically improved German rocket designs post WWII and only 125 of Operation Paperclip engineers were on Von Braun’s team (only ~30 were at NASA during the Apollo Program as administrators). It was the 400K Americans on the project who did the engineering & construction.
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@CJHandmer I think talent discovery should be part of the process. We could have online intelligence and creativity tests available to people who are likely to assimilate. Provide opportunities to those who have extreme talent. Let's find spiritual Americans and bring them home.
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Fascinating discussion, and I remain astonished by the resistance to the idea of using market mechanisms to regulate skilled migration. Employers want foreign workers? Why build some absurdly complex points system mediated by layers of semi-independent bureaucrats when you can just have a clearing price in the market? 150,000 spots a year, auctioned off. Direct government revenue, low overhead, and employers get to put their money where their mouth is.
Joseph Noel Walker@JosephNWalker
New episode! Learned a lot chatting with Martin Parkinson about the economics of migration policy. The issue that most people haven't properly understood: Australia has built an economy that requires roughly 2 million more workers than our population of citizens and permanent residents can supply. We've drifted into a guest-worker system that no government ever proposed. Is it possible to have an ethical temporary program for unskilled workers where there is no path to permanency? And what does that look like? We also discuss: - International student fees now fund close to 50% of the cost of all university research in Australia, which means a cap on student numbers trades off with research, R&D, and ultimately productivity. (Australian R&D spending already sits at 1.7% of GDP versus an OECD average of 2.7%.) - Australia has 250,000 skilled migrants -- including 50,000 engineers, 20,000 teachers, 16,000 nurses, and 1,300 electricians -- who were admitted because their qualifications were assessed as commensurate with Australian standards, but who cannot work in their fields because of state-government and professional-body licensing barriers. - The Australian skilled-occupation list is based on a 2001 taxonomy, which is why employers trying to bring in a global procurement manager were forced to map the role to "supermarket manager." - The Australian points test is "dumb": being 40 years and 1 month old gets you dramatically fewer points than being 39 years and 11 months -- Canada's system steps down gradually, ours falls off a cliff. - Indonesia's diaspora in Australia is 90,000 people -- the same size as Fiji's, and roughly 0.03% of Indonesia's population -- despite Indonesia being projected to become the world's fourth-largest economy by 2045. - And much more. Watch below - or on YouTube, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Timestamps: (0:00:00) – Introduction. (0:02:37) – What surprised Parkinson about Australia's immigration system? (0:10:20) – How does migration affect Australians' living standards? (0:16:56) – The political equilibrium (0:19:23) – What are the objectives of the migration program? (0:24:01) – The drift into a guest-worker system (0:41:40) – How leveraged are universities to international students? (0:47:56) – Should we have an official low-skilled migration program? (0:51:32) – Using migration to slow population ageing (0:58:42) – What "skills shortage" actually means (1:08:17) – Problems with the points test (1:14:52) – Our Soviet-style occupation list (1:24:45) – We need to better utilise our skilled migrants (1:34:39) – What is the biggest problem with Australia's migration system? (1:42:01) – How can we attract true global talent? (1:45:58) – Is the migration system robust to AI disruption? (1:53:38) – What should the upper/lower bound for net migration be? (1:56:43) – The Indonesian question (2:06:53) – How much more strategic weight would a bigger population buy us?
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