So, I left. It’s not nearly as easy as you claim.

First off, where? Where do they go?

Secondly, how do they stay? You need a visa. That’s not easy, especially if you lack higher education.

Thirdly, what about language?

Fourthly, what about support network? All of your knowledge of how law, politics, social customs, and more is now irrelevant. Whom do you ask for help with things? How do you make sure you don’t get scammed when buying an apartment? Or that you take the right bus? Or that your company is handling taxes properly?

Fifth, what about a job? Especially if you lack higher education, why would a company hire a foreigner? Unless they can pay you dirt, of course.

So yeah, this “just leave” thinking is absolute bullshit. You’re not actually thinking through things. It’s not that easy. Life improvement is not guaranteed.

On an opposing note, I keep thinking I should go back. Why? Because shit isn’t gonna get better if all the people who want change are gone. My life is pretty fucking rad here, but… seeing this happen to the US without me doing anything about it makes me feel like I’m abdicating my responsibilities as a citizen

It comes from a selfish mindset. Yes, you’re threatened, but you’re also promised with reward. It becomes a deviously simple equation at that point.

It’s the same as being mugged in a dark alley against a wall. If you believe there’s no escape, do you acquiesce despite not wanting to give money to a robber, or do you try to fight back and get shot?

I mean, in Judeo-Christian tradition, there’s the story of Abraham willingly sacrificing his son to Yahweh until Yahweh stops him last-second. This kind of behavior is explicitly taught: nothing is more important than sky-daddy’s whims.

Woo!!! I want the one with the ears!!!

You haven’t read anything about this. It’s very clear. The first thing you learn is that sex and gender are different. Sex is biology. Gender is identity.

The second thing you learn is that sex is not binary. (And gender, being a social construct, certainly is not set in stone.) Genes may be XX, but maybe some other factor may be preventing that gene from expressing fully or even at all. This can lead to highly androgynous folks or folks with odd genital configurations. It takes genes, gene expression, and hormones for a human to express characteristics of some sex. Not all three of these are perfectly aligned. You can argue that genes control all of it, but that doesn’t stand. Genes can conflict, and environmental factors can affect things.

I learned all that and more in just twenty minutes of reading. Please, go do some homework. Start with “what is the difference between sex and gender,” then let the rabbit hole take you down. At least, that’s the path that helped me learn a bunch of this stuff.

And regarding Dunning-Kruger, the key point is confidence. That said, I’ll caveat all the above I’ve said with this is just stuff that I’ve read from sources that I trust, which I can corroborate with my existing knowledge of genetics and broader biology. I’m not an expert. I can be proven wrong. Most of this is definitions and quite simple stuff, so my confidence is high but still shakeable.

Normally, I’m a stickler about answering asked questions, but your questions seem to be based on a misunderstanding of definitions. Once you get that sorted out, we can try again and maybe learn something together

I get to be useful!

Ceiling cat is a reference to possibly the earliest generation of memes. They mostly involved cats. Ceiling cat was a popular one of a cat poking its had down through a hole in a ceiling, captioned “ceiling cat is watching you masturbate” or something similar. The odd grammar/spelling is of the same Era, where these cat memes would be spoken in the “voice” of a cat. The most famous example is “I can haz cheezburger”

Leaving Britney alone is a reference to an early Era of YouTube video, where an actor bawling at the camera ranted about how people were being too mean to Britney Spears, a famous pop star. It was hotly debate whether the contents of the video were genuine or acting. Remember, this was before Snopes, even.

I think that was everything?

Count another in these parts of the internet!

I found the one with Dunning-Kruger! Do I win a prize???

It’s all pump and dump. Look at Elon with Doge Coin. Look at Trump with his dumbass NFT “cards.” Most initial coin offerings are just pump and dump schemes, and they’re often based on etherium.

Go read through “Foundations of Geopolitics,” think of recent Russian history, and reconsider your statement

But this is a bad idea.

Areas with high property value have higher quality schooling. Area with low property value have lower quality schooling. The rich stay rich. The poor stay poor.

Maybe education money shouldn’t come from property taxes. Maybe corporations should pay for the education they require their workers to have visa corporate taxes

Ah, good to know! Thank you for correcting me. I’ll edit my other comment

Ah, you have no answer. I’m not surprised. Thanks for validating my stereotype. A part of me was hoping you were better

Tell us what you know about charity, economic development, soft power, and trade deals.

I think you’re confusing Trump’s ill-informed theory with actually theory and practice.

If foreign goods are taxed, those companies will not simply absorb the hit to their profits. They will instead increase their prices, which hurts the consumer.

You may be thinking, “then won’t consumers buy other products?” If so, you need to think a step further. Are there other products that are just as cheap? Will other companies simply raise their prices to match and take advantage of the extra profit? Are there even locally made alternatives to the product, and, if so, are they cheaper than even the tariff price?

In practice, tariffs are only effective if there are local competitors within the same price bracket, and your populace can absorb the difference in price without much pain.

https://www.usimportdata.com/blogs/top-10-us-Imports-data-by-country-product-hs-code-database Electronics, vehicles, fuels, medicines, and plastics are among our top imports. Home built vehicles are usually expensive. For example, when you think cheap, you think of a Toyota Corolla or a Honda Civic something. We know fuel is important. Medicines are not an optional cost. Plastics are part of everything. Our economy relies a lot on imports. The US shifted away from manufacturing and towards a service economy a long time ago. We don’t have a many home-built goods as we used to.

Tariffs will hurt the average citizen by corporations increasing their prices to absorb the profit losses imposed by the tariffs. There are often no comparable local alternatives, and many of these goods are not optional. Americans will pay this price. In effect, this makes it a tax on normal citizens

Personally, I like the idea of restoring local manufacturing, and I think tariffs can play a role in this… but to do so without harming citizens requires subsidizing local industry to provide cheaper homemade alternatives along with a more gradual adjustment. We would also need to reduce the cost of living in order to make lower wages livable such that the labor cost of local manufacturing is lower. But we all know that’s not happening - we desperately need wages to go up right now to make the cost of living bearable. Slapping double-digit tariffs on goods suddenly is a great way to destabilize an economy. So uh… fuck Trump.

Since many answers aren’t actually answering the question…

My comment is largely wrong!! See the reply below

Most places require a permit to assemble en masse. There are “free speech zones” where you can create large gatherings without any kind of advance notice or permit or whatever. Most universities have a free speech zone towards the middle of their campuses. Cities will also often have at least one but somewhere that doesn’t inconvenience commerce, like a park or near city hall.

Most mass assembly requires a permit and sometimes a fee, even in public places. Following this prevents arrest by “disturbing the peace” or other such laws, usually.

How this squares with the first amendment is interpretation. Individual freedom of speech is protected except very specific public order and safety things, e.g. calling for violence. Coordinated, mass freedom of speech is perceived as a fast path to rioting.

I’m not saying this is right, but this is my understanding of how things work. I’m not a lawyer or an expert in these matters. This is just what I learned from activist friends in my university time ages ago.

As for expulsion, public universities are run by states. To my understand, Trump has no legal mechanism to do this. He’s just talking out of his ass or expects to bully public institutions into expelling students by threatening to withhold department of education funding… but he’s planning to kill that anyway, so 🤷‍♂️

Fuck this fake or normal nonsense.

It’s you. There’s you when you’re relaxed, and there’s you when you turn it up. It’s all you.

Just do whatever you feels most you in the moment. Want to be the hot shit on the block, turn it up. Giving no fucks, grab the T.

Have you heard of the Russian book Foundations of Geopolitics? Read a little about it and tell us what you think Russia’s goal was for starting the war

So what the fuck would you do? And then play out a realistic scenario of the result of your idea

I’ll start by saying I’m not a doctor. This is my layman’s understanding.

Historically, vaccines have been samples of either weakened or dead viruses. Through trial and error, we’ve been able to determine how to weaken or kill these viruses, then inject them into ourselves in the hopes that our immune system can learn to recognize and kill the virus. This has worked really well for a long time, but it’s costly and can be difficult to scale. For example, horses have very strong immune systems. It’s quite common to inject a virus that hurts humans into a horse, then harvest the horse’s blood to acquire the material needed to produce a vaccine. The horse’s immune system learns how to kill the virus, and we can use the to teach our immune systems.

mRNA vaccines take a whole different approach. They kind of co-opt the mechanism that viruses use to replicate.

First, let’s tall about what RNA is. You might know that DNA is used to produce proteins, and proteins are the tools that life uses to do… stuff. Almost everything, really. Thing is, DNA is stored safely inside cells’ nuclei, but protein production happens outside the nuclei, in ribosomes. So if DNA is needed to produce proteins, but DNA can’t be moved to the protein production center, how do? Our cells can produce another molecule called RNA. It’s basically half of DNA. Since you can derive one half of DNA from the other, it essentially carries the same information. Inside the nuclei, RNA is produced based on your DNA. That RNA is then moved to the protein production center to be used as the blueprint for protein production. Voila! Your cells have proteins now and can do stuff.

What did that have to do with viruses? But first, how do viruses work? Funny thing: at their core, viruses are kind of like protein missiles with an RNA payload. (This is why people argue that viruses aren’t really alive.) Viruses pierce your cells and inject their RNA into your cells. That RNA provides the blueprints to produce more RNA and the protein module, effectively, a copy of the virus. The viruses uses your cells’ infrastructure to reproduce.

With me so far? Here’s where it gets cool.

What if we could capture a virus’ RNA? What if we could then isolate just enough of the RNA blueprint to get some part of the protein missile, without the payload? And then what if we could get so specific that we could make sure that part of the protein missile is something your immune system could learn to recognize and kill? Lastly, what if we could package this harmless but recognizable part of the virus in a manner that your cells could mass manufacture it?

This is mRNA, the “m” standing for “messenger.” mRNA vaccines basically give your cells the blueprint to produce a recognizable part of a virus that won’t hurt you. Your cells then produce that virus part, and your immune system learns how to recognize and kill the virus based on that part.

The best part? We can do this fast. No need for trial and error on how to weaken viruses. No need to manage livestock like horses specifically to harvest their immune system material. The COVID vaccine was an mRNA vaccine. I haven’t actually checked the numbers, but I’m very confident that the COVID vaccine R&D was the fastest humanity has ever had for any vaccine. We’d been researching and experimenting with mRNA vaccines already, but they weren’t yet approved for medical use. For good reason, medicines go through a huge amount of testing before we start injecting ourselves with magic feel-good juice. Given the emergency that COVID was, most countries fast-tracked their approval process for the COVID mRNA vaccine. In the long run, this may actually have been a benefit, as we’ve learned a lot about how to produce these types of vaccines rapidly, at scale and even update them for new variants of a virus.

So yeah, mRNA vaccines are super fucking cool. They’re also a remarkably clever innovation, copying an idea from viruses and adapting it to a way to kill viruses. Theoretically, future vaccines should be produced faster, be better targeted, and have fewer side effects.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk? 😅