People don't realize how much immigration to the U.S. has slowed down.
And people don't realize what a big hole this is going to leave in our population.
One big reason we need immigration is that without it, we risk becoming an economic backwater as Asia catches up with us in terms of income.
Another reason is that our dependency ratio is rising, meaning that we have fewer and fewer working-age people to take care of each retiree.
Immigrants do much of the work of physically caring for our elderly people. Without them, eldercare prices will rise, and people will have to do more of the work of caring for their own elderly family members.
Furthermore, immigrants give a HUGE fiscal boost to our government coffers. Without them, taxes are going to have to rise in order to support the elderly.
Do not listen to the Tucker Carlson types and the Amy Wax types. Immigration is not a threat to America at all. Indeed, it's the LACK of immigration that's the threat.
Feel like Blu*sky is a microcosm for all of American liberalism right now. The entire left-of-center became defined by cancel culture. Now the spaces where that culture exists are shrinking under external attack, but everyone on the left just stays within those shrinking spaces.
There was this big idea that social media was this infinitely powerful tool that allowed a small # of progressives to shame a huge number of Americans into accepting their values. For a decade it seemed to be working. But it overreached and collapsed.
But progressives got addicted to that seemingly infinite power. They forgot everything else. They forgot how to persuade. They forgot how to organize. They forgot how to compromise. They thought the only tool they would ever need again was heckling and shunning on social media.
2/Most of the discourse around China in Western media these days is about U.S.-China competition (e.g. this podcast by @DKThomp and @RushDoshi). But I thought I'd write about something a little more positive -- the idea that China is building The Future.
2/After Covid, there was a general sense that America needed to be REBUILT -- not just from the pandemic, but from the aftermath of the Great Recession, the Rust Belt, and decades of institutional decay.
3/People argued about HOW to rebuild America. Naturally, progressives thought it would be more government-directed, while conservatives thought it would come from the private sector and from defense spending.
This is a very subtle and interesting question. It seems clear that right-wing interest in personal health is a response to the terrible health of non-college Americans. And the rightists are trying to invent an alternative approach that resists the hegemony of academia.
The fact is, college-educated Americans tend to be hypocritical about health. They watch what they eat, get lots of exercise, and try to eat "organic", but they preach fat acceptance and a disability-based approach to poor health. Rightists don't know how to deal with that.
In fact, this is representative of a broader pattern. College-educated progressives get married and stay marriage, but denigrate the idea of marriage. They work hard but denigrate the idea of hard work. Their personal success is based on rampant, galloping hypocrisy.
1/Here's something a lot of people I talk to don't understand about Japanese urbanism, and why Japanese cities are so special.
2/Japanese cities feel different than big, dense cities elsewhere -- NYC, London, and Paris, but also other Asian cities like Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Singapore.
There are many reasons for this, but today I'll focus on one: Zakkyo buildings.
3/When many people think of "mixed-use development", they think of stores on the first floor, apartments on the higher floors. This is sometimes called "shop-top housing" or "over-store apartments".
This is how most cities in the world do mixed-use development.