JohnRoberts said:
The elephant in the room is that the vast majority of these economic immigrants do not qualify for amnesty and they know it. The old game was to allow themselves to get captured and given a court date for an asylum hearing, years in the future.... they rarely win, but even more rarely don't show up. The recent crush has so overloaded the system that they are not even appointing dates, just cutting them loose (without even covid tests). Perhaps search "Cloward-Piven" strategy from the 60s to promote socialism by overloading government systems. I won't do your homework for you.
This is a big issue, I understand the US position to reduce illegal immigration, and I accept it, however there is a double standard in the US because people will deliberately hire illegals for many reasons. Several friends of mine have migrated legally to Canada recently with their wives and children, they have legal jobs and everything, this is in fact due to a program Canada has promoting immigration to their country, but what my friends tell me is that in Canada its practically impossible to get a job being an illegal "Its not like the US" were the exact words they used. In fact, I've heard of many people working in the US who crossed illegally or even only with a tourist VISA, US employers wont care about green cards or whatever. So I don't think building more walls is going to stop it if there are people inside paying them. Perhaps if the US adopted Canada's position or if they passed legislation for harsher sanctions or prison time for those who hire illegals, illegal immigration would stop. But IMHO, they need those immigrants so they are turning a blind eye.
The mexican goverment wont move a finger either unless the US really pressures like when Trump threatened to add taxes for import goods unless Mexico's south border got protected, the goverment instantly sent the National Guard to the southern border. Its not that Mexico can't protect the border, its that they don't want to, all the money that Mexicans living in the US send back to Mexico called "remesas" are essentially part of the national GDP. I just read that remesas hit a record last year, around 46,000 million dollars being sent back to Mexico from the US, which acounts for 3.8% of Mexico's national GDP last year...
In the course of my business travel in Mexico (last century) I visited Mexico City, Monterrey, and other well behaved areas. While poverty was visible at one resort where we held a larger dealer seminar that was surrounded by fences topped by barbed wire to keep the locals out.
This is very common, as the cities expand, they will buy large pieces of land in poor areas and create upper class neighborhoods, in fact small cities, it is quite a shock because in an instant you are in a rich neighborhood, then you drive 4 or 5 blocks and you are suddenly in an extremely poor one.
I noticed something similar whilst living in the US, near the University everything was peachy, but if you drove like 6 blocks west of where we lived, things would change dramatically, we were strongly advised not to go there.
My room mates and I used to live in an apartment, they were living there before I arrived to the states, my roommates warned me about the 2 guys living in the apartment below, my friends refered to them as "the homeless" and told me they were very rude, to be honest the only couple of times I interacted with them they just said to me "Hola Amigo", they weren't homeless obviously beacuse they lived in an apartment, but they were these nasty, dirty individuals, they looked like hobos, they obviously didn't have a job, they were extreme hoarders, you couldn't see anything through their windows because of all the sh*t they had stacked up to the ceeling, you couldn't get 6 feet near their door which they left open all day because the smell was unbearable.
Apparently they used to recieve some support from the goverment but eventually they got evicted, the landlord told us that the apartment was a mess, he had to replace everything, floors, walls, etc.., he took them to court.
I have been paying attention to the situation in Mexico for years.... The elephant in that room is that US drug users fund all that business.. Recently China has introduced fentanyl to the cartels to replace the pot trade that has diminished since legalization.
I didn't become aware of fentanyl until Prince died, I didn't even know what it was, but yes, fentanyl, cocaine and meth are the main sources of revenue for the Cartels, marihuana not that much, it was spare change for them.
If you ask me, the only solution to this drug mess is to legalize all drugs both in the US and Mexico, if I am not mistaken, Portugal did that experiment and drug overdose cases didn't arise by any significant amount. But I am afraid that will not happen, there is just too much money involved for both countries.
Now another huge revenue source is human trafficking. The cartels charge significant funds and put wristbands on the children to identify who has paid, which coyote group. I have heard large estimates of how much money they make every day with the border open. Politics is about working the fears of the population to maintain political power.
The guys helping migrants cross the border are usually refered to as "polleros" (it means something like chickeners, perhaps it has something to do with how chickens are transported all crowded in small boxes on the back of a truck), some of them work for the cartels, some of them work independently. What I do know is that cartels will sometimes intercept migrants coming from central and south america on their way to the US and they will offer them 2 options: either they work for the cartel for a salary, or they get shot where they stand. Long ago it was big news when something like 60 Salvadorian migrants who refused to work for the cartel were executed in cold blood.
Germany has already made a number of major policy changes to "save the planet" including shuttering nuclear power plants, ironically needing to burn coal when the sun don't shine and wind don't blow...
That is exactly what I heard, it was a mess if you ask me.
Speaking about unreliability of wind and sun power, Warren Buffett has offered to build a few $B worth of backup NG power plants for TX... He plans to store 30 days worth of NG, JIC... This is either very smart or silly, I am not sure which but I haven't sold my Berkshire stock yet, because he is generally pretty smart.
JR
Well if you are going NG why not go nuclear? its just beating a dead horse, I believe its because the world is afraid of the word "nuclear", so they avoid it as much as they can, but eventually, they will realize that all these wind and solar energies are just a band-aid for them to feel good about the enviroment, it might work for small communities in certain areas but it is not a big scale solution. I'm not saying get rid of solar and wind, I am saying that the solution is nuclear.
A lot of houses have solar panels and they reduce their power consumption dramatically, but we are talking about a house and most are not completely independent from the power grid, when other factors come into play like factories, buildings, etc.. solar panels are worthless. I've visited NYC and Las Vegas, they are basically huge christmass trees, I watched NYC from the top of the Empire State at night, the amount of lights are astronomical, wihtout counting AC, and all that jazz, try powering that with wind and solar, good luck!
Warren Buffet is indeed very smart and down to earth, he is the only one (at least for what I know) extremely rich guy who is not a greedy, ruthless and a bad MF (Bill Gates might be another one lately but at the begining of his career he was a POS) I believe he still lives in a very modest house he bought years before he was rich, he is also been married to the same woman for decades. He seems to enjoy playing the investment/revenue game more than money itself. Trivia of the day: Mouser Electronics belongs to a conglomerate owned by Warren Buffet.
We have our own rich asshole, you might have heard of him, he is called Carlos Slim, one of the richest men on earth. I remember around 15 years ago when he basically had a monopoly on all telecommunications here, I was reading an interview of him in a magazine, and the reported asked "Why is the internet service so slow and expensive here in Mexico whilst in the rest of the world its cheap and faster?" he shamelesly replied: "Because if I make it cheaper and faster, people will start using Skype more and stop using their cellphones and landlines", yeah a real POS.
Fortunately, things have changed since then, there are a lot more companies in the game and we now have more affordable fees.
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