>Yet most of the inhabitants of the United States are descended from people who immigrated during the time period you're talking about. Why was it ok for them but not for people immigrating today?
Why do you think it was OK back then? Have you talked to any Native Americans about the effects of uncontrolled migration on their tribes? Plainly put, it was an unmitigated disaster and a genocide. They used to control the whole continent (but divided between various tribes of course, that sometimes didn't get along); now their numbers are puny and they're corralled in some shitty reservations.
>Do you want criminals from other towns/counties/states coming to yours?
>If open borders work between Washington and Oregon, why don't they work between Washington and Canada?
Within a country, it's easy: people have criminal records, and can't just skip town and go to the next town and assume a new identity. (Centuries ago, however, they did.) Between countries, it's not so easy: countries don't share their criminal data that easily. That's why we have passports: it's an identification document that shows the destination country that the person is not a criminal and is allowed to travel (since they agreed together not to give these out to serious criminals).
>Immigrants pay taxes
Some do, some don't. Some go to Germany expecting a free ride, passing through all the poorer countries along the way.
>Instead of banning them, why not just let them come but make them ineligible for social services? That's cruel
Why is that cruel? If 100M people suddenly decided to move into Andorra, how exactly do you think the country is going to pay for social services for them?
No, because they have no ability enforce any policy.
>Why do you need this “global government” to let people travel around?
You said you don't want borders. That's different than just letting people travel freely. National borders entail much more than freedom of travel.
>not too long ago people were able to travel wherever they wanted without visa or passport
Yeah, because it was really difficult to travel anywhere except maybe between neighboring countries. When travel became cheap and easy and countless millions of people starting doing it, they made more restrictions because some people were taking advantage of it.
>Why do you think that we should keep those restrictions?
Do you want criminals from other countries coming to your country? In those wonderful olden days you speak of, that's what happened: people committed terrible crimes, and then evaded capture and fled to other places where no one knew who they were or what they did. Understandably, people don't really want that any more.
We also have the issue of economic migrants. No country really wants to be inundated with millions of poor people from some other country; in the era of modern social services, countries don't have the resources to provide for them. In those olden days, when people moved to a new country, they either figured out how to make a living, or they starved to death, or maybe were exiled or killed if the people there didn't like them for some reason.
The USA is a single country with a federal government, so your suggestion there makes no sense.
The Schengen zone is basically the same as the EU, which isn't a single government, but it's acting a lot like one in many ways. Either way, what you seem to be advocating is a single global government. There's no way to have no borders without having a single government controlling everything.
>It's almost violating somehow, maybe like seeing capitalism get violated or something.
No one's being violated here.
>I mean, what if you went to the grocery store and they told you they don't feel like selling food to you at the time but they might have some appointments open. Hunger doesn't have a snooze button to delay it until the time of your appointment.
You don't go to the grocery store if you're hungry (in fact, that's the worst time to shop for groceries). If you're hungry, go to a restaurant.
Anyway, if there's a fancy and horribly overpriced grocery store in town, and they treat customers like this, and those customers just give in and make appointments and come back later, how is the grocery store operating badly?
Normally, such a grocery store would quickly go under, as customers would go to a competing grocery store. But with Apple, that never happens. Apple customers will keep coming back for more.
Some people (apparently many people) actually like this kind of buying experience. I imagine some ultra-high end brands of clothing and cars treat people similarly.
>in their attempt to turn that into £2500, they got £0. That isn't good business.
It IS good business. It's proven by the company's stock price and financial results. For every customer like you that leaves in disgust, there's 100 more that are happy to be upsold like this and empty their bank accounts. Consequently, Apple is the most valuable company in the world.
>Also, the tedium of nowadays knowing that all the products will be bumped in spec in 9-12 months means that instead of excitement, buyer's remorse has already kicked in before reaching the store, for the savvy consumer midway though the product cycle. Again, not the result effective capitalism should be going for.
Yes, it IS. Again, the company's financial results speak for themselves. Customers are happy to buy new Apple stuff every year, and the company is profiting enormously.
If you want to be mad at someone, be mad at all the idiots that buy into this.
It's also much less likely to result in an upsell or selling additional merchandise. Why would they want to lose that opportunity?
Leaving a bad taste in a customer's mouth isn't a problem. Just look at the comments here from people exactly like that: they went somewhere else, and then bought the exact same thing. Sure, they're griping about it, but who cares? Apple still got their money for the item, and they freed up room in the Apple Store for another customer who might be more amenable to up-selling.
Why should Apple care about pissing off customers with this kind of treatment? It's not like they're going to buy an Android Phone or Samsung watch or whatever. They're going to buy the Apple product they have their heart set on, no matter how poorly they're treated by employees at the Apple store. So exactly what incentive does Apple have to make their shopping experience more efficient and hassle-free?
Is that the lesson though? It seems people are falling over themselves to buy stuff at Apple stores despite these annoying and awful experiences, and Apple is the most valuable company in the world.
It seems the lesson is to treat knowledgable customers like morons using patronizing staff and try to upsell them as much as you can, even if it makes them leave the store in disgust.
9 & 3 is the best for control, but you're right, it's worse in case the airbag deploys. 10 & 2, I imagine, is even worse, since you always have an arm in front of the airbag in that case, so your arm might be propelled into your face if it goes off. 8 & 4 helps, but seems pretty bad for control, but on highway trips it's more relaxing I think.
This isn't really happening much any more. Spinning-platter HDs are barely increasing in size any more (I got a 4TB portable drive 5 years ago that I still use; now, looking at what's available, 5TB is the max and 4TB is still at the high end). SSDs are growing, but still not cost-competitive with spinning platters, and not really reliable for long-term offline storage anyway like spinning platters.
There just isn't that much demand for large-scale storage, since everyone just keeps their data "in the cloud" or has subscriptions to online services now. 20 years ago, HD sizes were doubling every year.
He can spin stories and build worlds very well indeed, but he can't write dialog or direct actors worth a damn. He needs someone else to handle this stuff. His best work was when he came up with the grand vision for something, but someone else handled dialog, scriptwriting, and directing. Basically, the guy was a technical genius but had no eye for the human element.
>I can't think of very many people who genuinely enjoy the "smart" aspect of "smart TVs", for example
Count me in the camp that does. My TV runs GoogleOS (Android), and it's great, because I don't need some other device plugged in to do what I want to do with it. There's only 2 things I want from this thing:
1. Playing external media. It has a USB port, so I can plug in thumb drives and play video files from them. The built-in OS works fine for this, and seems to handle any media file or codec I throw at it.
2. Playing YouTube with a good player. Since it's Android, I can load APKs from wherever I want, and so I installed "SmartTubeNext", which blocks ads and sponsor segments automatically. It works almost too well.
I think the mistake most other people make with smart TVs is that they get ones with crappy proprietary OSes, so with those you have no control over anything and can't run any 3rd-party software like SmartTubeNext. Of course, eventually this model could lose support from the mfgr, causing security issues or not being compatible with the apps I want, but for now it's quite nice.
Why do you think it was OK back then? Have you talked to any Native Americans about the effects of uncontrolled migration on their tribes? Plainly put, it was an unmitigated disaster and a genocide. They used to control the whole continent (but divided between various tribes of course, that sometimes didn't get along); now their numbers are puny and they're corralled in some shitty reservations.
>Do you want criminals from other towns/counties/states coming to yours? >If open borders work between Washington and Oregon, why don't they work between Washington and Canada?
Within a country, it's easy: people have criminal records, and can't just skip town and go to the next town and assume a new identity. (Centuries ago, however, they did.) Between countries, it's not so easy: countries don't share their criminal data that easily. That's why we have passports: it's an identification document that shows the destination country that the person is not a criminal and is allowed to travel (since they agreed together not to give these out to serious criminals).
>Immigrants pay taxes
Some do, some don't. Some go to Germany expecting a free ride, passing through all the poorer countries along the way.
>Instead of banning them, why not just let them come but make them ineligible for social services? That's cruel
Why is that cruel? If 100M people suddenly decided to move into Andorra, how exactly do you think the country is going to pay for social services for them?