Elixir is great, and I have recently started using it myself, but its not a substitute for Rust. Try writing device driver in Elixir, or anything CPU intensive.
> The problem is who do we ally with that we can trust now.
"We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow."
― Lord Palmerston
There are lots of possible allies, but no one single ally to depend on. India to counter balance China, Canada to have an ally in North America, etc.
> it's worrying that the EU doesn't have a mechanism to expel countries.
> The Western countries invaded Iraq under false pretenses
True, but I would say the current refugees are not those who most need refuge. Religious minorities who are the most threatened by ISIS are under-represented.
> it is already possible to quickly reject asylum-seekers from known-safe countries.
It does not happen though. it happens in the end, but the system in ridiculously slow and inefficient.
> And the pressure on housing is very multifaceted. A lot of NIMBYism when it comes to new construction, and boomers who have invested in the housing market and don't want to see their investment evaporate by more supply on the housing market.
1. highly inefficient: its slow and badly run.
2. seriously considers applications that clearly false - people from Canada and the EU do not need to claim asylum! Those numbers are tiny but it illustrates a winder spread problem. people who feel safe enough to return to the country they "fled" on holiday also clearly do not have a genuine claim.
3. It fails to provide a route for a lot of people who do have a genuine claim - e.g. religious minorities in the Middle East.
It is no longer true that the numbers of legal migrants are vastly higher because the government have decided that they need to cut the numbers of immigrants and the easiest way to do this is to cut legal immigration.
That is the original definition, but then all immigrants are expats, and all expats are migrants. The words become synonyms. Then its become very interesting to ask why people prefer one word over the other for particular groups of people.
What dimension of genetics? Race is not genetic. If you try to cluster people by genetic similarity the end result does not look like people's idea of "race" at all, and different (even closely related cultures like the UK and the US) have different classifications of race. http://pietersz.co.uk/2023/08/racism-culture-different
In the days of racial science (so up to the 1950s or so) some east Africans and South Asians were classified as "caucasian". Textbooks and encyclopedias from the time say so.
Race is not highly correlated to religion. Christianity is followed by numbers of Europeans, South Americans, Africans, and Asians. Islam by semitic, African, South Asian, South East Asian people. Buddhists are most commonly, South Asian, SE Asian or East Asian - still multiple different "races". The same with cultures. I do not see how race correlates to politics at all. There are weak correlations with culture and language, very weak within countries.
Other big industries. Finance and banking switches to English the moment you deal with anything international. Academic publications and conferences in many fields are heavily tilted towards English. You have more specialist textbooks in English than in any other language in many fields.
> I have experience in what you describe, as I live far from London in a place I'm not from.
Me too, but people have been pretty friendly and welcoming, and i have not been here long.
> A lot of it is 'not from here [the village/town/county]' (and not sounding like you're from here) rather than 'not white' or 'not from the UK' so I can't hard agree it's strictly xenophobia/racism etc.
People in the north seem to make a bigger deal me being a southerner (and my accent) than non-white. Of course there is a bias because expressing the former is a lot more socially acceptable.
> I suspect a lot of the defensive patriotism there is a product of being so badly treated for so long.
Racism can also take different forms. India has the world's oldest and most deeply embedded racism, but westerners rarely even recognise it for what it is.
> I've done some traveling in non-English speaking countries and it was a huge hurdle not being completely fluent in the local language. It just seems like common sense to me to dive in all the way if you are moving somewhere long term.
I know lots of English speaking people who have settled in non-English speaking countries (or at least countries in which most people do not speak English as a first language) with little knowledge of the main language(s).