The Young Gamers Who Shook the Intelligence World
https://www.yahoo.com/news/young-gamers-shook-intelligence-world-120948421.html
Month: April 2023
Want To Beat China? Let in More Chinese!
“A complex set of formulas caps immigration from China at about 150,000 people per year. For a country with 1.4 billion people, that’s not even a drop in the bucket. Radically increasing or eliminating this limit would do much more to halt China’s rise as a global power than harming American users by banning TikTok. Many young Chinese would jump at the chance to move to the U.S.
Why would so many Chinese be eager to leave their homes to move thousands of miles away? For starters, the United States is much, much richer. Despite decades of unprecedented economic growth, China’s gross domestic product (GDP) per capita is still 80 percent lower than America’s. For all its development and flashy infrastructure projects, China is barely a middle-income country. As of 2022, more than half of the country lives on less than $10 per day, compared to only 3 percent of Americans and about 2 percent of Europeans.
Further, China has a repressive, authoritarian government. Despite China’s harsh penalties for dissent, many of its citizens have taken to the streets in recent months to speak out against state oppression. This suggests that many Chinese, especially young and educated ones, are unhappy with the Communist regime.”
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“China already faces a demographic crisis. Its population is aging and now declining, with its social safety net increasingly strained. The CCP, long reliant on economic growth for its legitimacy, faces the possibility that China will grow old before it grows rich. Bright young people drive economic growth in any nation. Their exodus would doom China to languish in economic and demographic turmoil.
Allowing more Chinese people into American would not only harm a perceived adversary; it would actively help the United States as well. Immigrants have been an economic engine for America. Immigrants and their children make up a disproportionate share of patent holders, as well as nearly half of the founders of Fortune 500 companies. Even an average year of immigration to the U.S., according to some estimates, increases GDP by as much as $72 billion.”
No, the U.S. Shouldn’t Wage War Against Mexican Cartels
“As Cato Institute Policy Analyst Daniel Raisbeck has written for Reason, Plan Colombia’s aid did initially “help the Colombian military to severely weaken the once-formidable [Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC)]. But Plan Colombia’s anti-narcotics element was an unqualified failure.” Per Raisbeck:
“By 2006, “coca cultivation and cocaine production levels (had) increased by about 15 and 4 percent, respectively.” In 2019, there were more hectares cultivated with coca leaf in Colombia (212,000) than two decades earlier (160,000).
The so-called FARC “dissidents,” thousands of fighters who did not demobilize in 2016, still control large swathes of the cocaine business. They wage constant combat over production areas and export routes against other guerrilla groups and criminal organizations, including several with links to Mexican drug cartels.”
American counternarcotics efforts yielded similarly bad results in Afghanistan. The U.S. spent about $9 billion to tackle Afghanistan’s opium and heroin production, only for the effort to be “perhaps the most feckless” of “all the failures in Afghanistan,” according to The Washington Post’s analysis of confidential government interviews and documents. By 2018, Afghan farmers were growing poppies on four times as much land as they were in 2002. Operation Iron Tempest, meant to cripple Afghanistan’s opium production labs, folded within a year. “Many of the suspected labs turned out to be empty, mud-walled compounds,” noted the Post.
The war on drugs has helped turn Latin America into the most violent region in the world. Criminalization has led to the proliferation of black market activity, a boom in many countries’ prison populations, and increased corruption across Latin America. It’s also contributed to a huge number of homicides: At least half of the violent deaths in Colombia, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, and Venezuela are estimated to be drug-related, according to the World Economic Forum.
Despite those failures, many Republicans still want to use war on terror tactics to fight Mexican cartels.”
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“The increase in overdose deaths among Americans is tragic and obviously a problem. It isn’t one that will be solved by fighting the war on drugs just a little bit harder. It certainly isn’t one that will be solved by bombing a neighboring country against its wishes, risking further escalation. It requires being realistic about the policies that have made drug use more dangerous. “That starts with bipartisan support for prohibition,” writes Reason’s Jacob Sullum, “which creates a black market where the quality and potency of drugs are highly variable and unpredictable.”
Simply stopping the supply of drugs into the country is an impossible task, as decades of prohibition show. Republicans would be far better off embracing harm-reduction strategies rather than pushing for another episode of military adventurism that is destined to fail.”
Despite Multiple States Abolishing Single-Family-Only Zoning, Very Few Duplexes and Triplexes Are Being Built
“The modest increase in housing production can be largely explained by how marginal many of these missing middle reforms have been.
Often, cities will legalize missing middle housing without allowing the new multi-unit buildings to be much larger than the single-family homes they’d replace. That means a builder faces all the costs of tearing down an old unit without the ability to add much additional revenue-generating floor space.”
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“Another problem facing missing middle home construction is a whole thicket of nonzoning rules and practices that assume new construction will either be single-family homes or larger apartment buildings.
Critics Lose Their Mind as Arkansas Makes It a Bit Easier for Teens To Work
Blame America’s Air Traffic Control System for Your Flight Delay
Top Expert on Fascism WARNS of Trump and MAGA movement’s DANGER to America | Burn the Boats
The One-Way Rent Control Ratchet
Police Found a Blunt in Their Car. So They Seized Their Kids.
“Bianca Clayborne and Deonte Williams were driving through rural Tennessee with their five young children when they were pulled over. When police found 5 grams of marijuana in the car, Williams was arrested and the five children were seized by local child protective services. One month later, the couple is still fighting to regain custody of their children.”
New Regulations Won’t Stop the Next Bank Collapse
“whether SVB’s situation would have been different had these regulations remained in place is highly questionable. “You knew just by looking at this bank that it was growing at exceptionally rapid rate, which should have been a red flag to look at,” Thomas Hoenig with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University told Marketplace. “So I don’t blame it on so much on the rollback of Dodd-Frank. I blame it on the fact that the bank management didn’t understand the fact that interest rates change and they need to be managing their portfolio accordingly.”
Besides, even without the stricter rules, bank regulators still could have acted but did not. So, the idea that new regulations are needed to stop the next midsize bank collapse is suspect, to say the least.”
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“”It appears that the leading causes of the failure of Silicon Valley Bank were managers who maintained a woefully under-diversified asset sheet, and a small group of investors who sparked a panic that led depositors to withdraw money at a rate that would be unsustainable for any bank,” said Sen. Chris Coons (D–Del.) in a statement. “SVB was subject to federal and state supervision, and it’s not clear what additional regulatory requirements might have yielded a different outcome.””