Just because it's not openly shared does not mean that there aren't large databases of everything from working refresh keys to entire profiles indexed out there for the large services. Most data leaks and breaches don't get reported, or acknowledged, or are downplayed in their potential effect (but weirdly, also given more weight than they deserve since it becomes pointless to have so much data that doesn't add anything new to, say, a profile of a person)
HIPAA doesn't have a private cause of action so if a violation happens, it's a wealth transfer to the government, it doesn't mean anything to you or any individual.
And most companies can simply price it in as cost of doing business at this point.
Except Chinese hegemony is illusory beyond what it considers its immediate sphere of influence which also means it really cannot project force in any way but economically. It can barely take care of business at home. It's puzzling to many as to why America sees China as somehow equal in threat and in capability since in reality neither is remotely true. China doesn't even have a policy that is truly expansionary since Taiwan is an irredentist claim. Its armed forces have not seen combat since 1979 and that was largely a ground war. Without connections or having acquired one previously it's becoming difficult to obtain a passport to leave, although, it's also not all that easy to find a place for you to settle as a Chinese citizen without some sort of skills that allow you to pretend like society under you is unstable.
Why would you say "but economically" in your first sentence?
Is hegemony merely a competition about who can blow up the most people? If you think the Chinese economy doesn't count for anything re force projection because they haven't bombed anyone lately idk what to tell you.
Why doesn't the USA stomp out Russian aggression in Ukraine? Does American force projection only come into play when bombing third world poverty states? Should I thus conclude American hegemony is illusory? Do you think the wars America has prosecuted in the past two decades have made the country stronger?
HAHAHAHAHA my goodness. You actually believe that?
Everyone in China is constantly violating laws, the difference is that black letter law is essentially meaningless and the country is run by an administrative state that is controlled by the party.
You can't really get things done without breaking the law. China doesn't properly tabulate, and therefore cannot release, anything like accurate crime data. But the crime rate is certainly higher since it's pretty much impossible to even go online and do just about anything without breaking some law. What is written is so vague and nearly any conduct can fall under it.
The ambiguity doesn't make the country safer, they just have a media hegemony and active censorship. Healthcare is woeful and "cheap" comes with "quotas on patients seen" meaning that doctors frequently have 1-2 minutes to see patients and one can become an MD much earlier than one can in the US. And since the perception is that no food is really 100% safe, it's more acquiescence, and not confidence, that people show.
Hell, you having the option of choosing to opt into vaccines is even an improvement. In China you are stuck with the state prescribed schedule and that's it. Unless you're extremely wealthy, but then again, where is that not an exception?
Eh private prosecutions and third party standing are generally disfavored to such an extent that sure, attention-whoring legislators will propose it, but whether it even passes constitutional muster on the state level is an open question, and open in every state.
I'm sure that it's real nice to have the lack of IPs be a problem that only tangentially affect one's daily experience but try speaking to someone who lives in a jurisdiction that is de facto independent but because of a frozen conflict or some sort of political dispute that predates their birth can neither be assigned a TLD nor be a member of an RIR. There's a giant first mover advantage and the system devised to dish out IPv4 subnets is essentially a cartel. The secondary markets is the rational economic response in the face of a market that is monopolistic, poorly designed, and acts as an absolute gatekeeper to something that's fundamental to life in modern times.
The fact is that just because states and police really wish that 1 IP = 1 person but in reality that's hardly true. Residential and non-residential IPs are not really different. The resource is misallocated and what else does anyone expect? If investigations into actual criminal activity is solely based on IP addresses then it has always been one that is done incompetently. Sorry that the heuristic most convenient to the state isn't actually that great for what the state appropriated it to do. Whose fault is that? IP Geolocation is a massive backdoor whose purported efficacy has been used for geofencing warrants that basically make a mockery out of probable cause. It is also used for no good reason to help authoritarian nations and in the name of jingoism ends up inconveniencing people at the very least. My father spends 3-5 months out of the year in China and while there, he can't access his mortgage company and can't call them, can't renew his vehicle registration, can't check his gmail, and can't even purchase, but can nevertheless run, Turbotax. He's American, and there are hundreds of thousands of Americans overseas that find themselves in this awkward spot because of overreliance on one bad heuristic. So I have to pay his mortgage until he returns, every year for months, and also essentially while imitating him take care of a bunch of quotidian things that he can certainly do himself but since it's hard to teach a 65 year old man how to hop the GFW reliably, I have to go through this rigamarole. Imagine if I didn't have some cash set aside, or that I haven't paid for my own dwelling already. It certainly doesn't stop state actors from attacking when they want, but it sure makes it easy to pretend like you did something meaningful while in reality all you've done is inconvenienced your own customers. The system is broken, lamenting that fact isn't a good look.
Except even as the press release states right off the bat, Fentanyl is efficacious, cost-efficient, and can be made widely available in areas like the global south without extensive pharmaceutical production infrastructure in place. The overdose crisis is in fact not really something that came out of the drug itself, just as the prevalence of Oxycodone before the enforced policy change shifted the usage patterns into a far more dangerous direction in heroin and tar and then, adulterated versions with fentanyl. People who are prescribed fentanyl for pain are not dying in droves. If you've had surgery, you may have been given fentanyl. If you're reading this, you, like most people, survived it just fine.
The crisis is one created by policy and cannot be eliminated on the pharmaceutical end. This isn't a case of methanol being sold as ethanol or SSRIs having less than ideal efficacy rates while causing widespread sexual dysfunction at a rate much higher than originally thought, or Zolpidem leading to over a hundred observational notes published in medical journals describing dangerous activity performed even on small doses followed by anterograde amnesia that certainly is a real thing that is also potentially dangerous, but incredibly difficult to study. Those effects are happening when the medication is taken as prescribed Do people take those without prescriptions? Of course, but one assumes the risk, and also, anyone ever seen a Zoloft pill mill?
Fentanyl had been diverted in small quantities onto black market supply chains for as long as it has been available. You can absolutely get an Actiq Pop in 2006 if you really wanted it, and the thing is a lollipop for crying out loud. It didn't cause widespread overdoses, it didn't even cause any significant black market demand. It was at best a curiosity. It's hard to quantify a subjective experience, but generally it was regarded as "not fun" anecdotally. Heroin is fun. Hydromorphone is even more fun but the best ROA leaves you with a 5-10 minute high at best and takes about that much time to prep. Oxycodone was fun but since the DEA made sure that it was as difficult to obtain as possible all of a sudden and what was available was spiked with enough APAP so that your liver might give out before you overdosed, well, what does cutting off the supply but leaving the demand in place do? The crisis as we know it today was inevitable in some form. It's created by policy, which is not set by scientists, and in fact when hydrocodone/APAP was rescheduled for Schedule II a specific reply to patient access concerns was "we don't take that into account", according to the DEA. Thanks for the candor, sadly we've gotten very little of it in the years since.
But of course, even on the black market, people overdose in a manner that is to a degree predictable. Long term users with steady supplies - say, everyone who's on a benzodiazepine long term - aren't overdosing regularly (yes, the LD50 of benzodiazepines generally makes overdosing on it alone very difficult if not impossible, but kicking it cold turkey does actually cause deaths from seizures and when mixed with another depressant like alcohol it becomes almost trivial to overdose on it, arguably making it at least in theory a more dangerous drug if one takes the view of the DEA). They are mostly able to obtain legitimate, low cost, and frequently entirely legal versions of, well, name the variety. From Triazolam (3 hour half life) to Midazolam (water soluble) to Etizolam (scheduled into schedule I based on 4 cases in Norway where when mixed with another depressant patients ended up in the ER. All survived and were discharged almost immediately. The reason why the DEA laundered cases in Norway through the FDA to justify at first an emergency scheduling and then turned it into a permanent one? Because they couldn't find any cases that demonstrated the purported danger in the US or Canada.) Overdoses happen when someone takes too much of a substance, but "too much" is difficult to determine when you don't have a reliable supplier in terms of quality and adulteration, but also, because tolerance gets built up so that long term users can use prodigious amounts and be just fine. But how do we make sure that nobody knows where their tolerance is at? Non-medically assisted, pseudoscientific "sobriety help" like AA or its variants that are ordered by the court, and of course, probation, testing, in-patient medicaid fraud mills, you name it. Since none of these actually do anything except use homebrewed aversion therapy or even less efficient, shame, to achieve what is basically not even a real goal but is tied to the criminal justice system, congrats, you have the perfect storm of demand not knowing how much to actually demand for. Fentanyl being the adulterant made this last inevitable easier, but it only hastened what had been happening for quite some time. When heroin supply on streets increased, fentanyl related deaths began decreasing. Wonder why? It's correlative, but observational studies take a lot more data and a lot longer time periods, although it would certainly follow previously observed patterns.
This may be interesting as a scientific venture, but treating it as anything but that is foolhardy and misguided. We know how to control pain. We know how to reduce the harmful externalities that form part of the definition of substance use disorder since we, as in society and lawmakers elected by us, are responsible for those harmful externalities in the first place. Fentanyl is not the problem. Making sure that there's no safe way to reduce potential harm associated with, ultimately, a personal choice favored by some but certainly not all as recreation, killed the hundreds of thousands since Lou Reed sang Heroin and put it onto the Velvet Underground and Nico. Why are we still acting brand new?
I’ve been to a few AA meetings when I was trying to get my mom sober and I never got the vibe that it was about “aversion therapy” for alcohol. The whole point seemed to be to discharge your egotistical need to be “in control” of the alcohol and accept that it was taking over your life despite your best efforts. You were then supposed to seek help from the people in the group to try to keep that from happening. There wasn’t really a culture of shame but rather acceptance there. And they also pushed a lot of ideas like repair after rupture that are a part of normal human relationships. So I don’t really buy what you’re saying here.
Singapore's immigration system is fundamentally different from what the modern American system have morphed into. It is far easier to enter Singapore without a visa when compared to the US, and while the EB-5 investor visa program caused an absurd moral panic in the US and ended up getting limited to such an extent that it basically is no longer a real viable path to gain legal permanent residency in the US, Singapore's government has broad discretion - which it exercises in reality, so it's not something written just for show - to significantly shorten residency requirements (from 10 years down to 12 months in some cases) and allows for highly skilled or investors to gain citizenship, not the convoluted visa-change-of-status-adjustment-of-status-naturalization train that privileges European countries first and foremost while making it extremely difficult for even skilled or even US educated nationals of Mexico, the Philippines, India, and China to gain permanent residency. On the lower-skilled side neither country allows a pathway for migrant laborers to stay regardless, although perversely the American system implicitly encourages not just marriage but consummation as proof of validity which is brought up in interviews for adjustment of status. The immigration system automatically equates marriage with sex and heavily privileges "family-based immigration" to such an extent that it basically incentivizes marital rape via official policy. Singapore doesn't do that, and countries that have marital-based immigration systems don't tend to be this explicit about it.
I don't know how you get "eugenic" out of the Singaporean nationality law, full stop. Income or skill is not genetically bound, after all. The US, in fact, does have explicitly eugenics-based criteria in its naturalization process in that it retains the quota that existed in some form since 1882 but simply added a step in front so that it can claim to have removed to quota from where it was while maintaining a de facto quota system that only affects four nations - one it once colonized, two it has a history of vilifying in overt racist terms. In addition, even though USCIS employees are not doctors and are not trained in diagnosing or determining mental illness and its potential impacts or lack thereof, one is frequently asked at the citizenship interview if one had been diagnosed with a mental illness, and since stating an untruthful answer is grounds for removal and also a minor but extremely easy to prove felony, even erroneous diagnoses or conditions that pose no danger like ADHD may result in rejection of otherwise eligible applications. Since there's no "cure" for many of these conditions it puts the applicant in a sort of limbo, and this is asked after background checks and a ridiculously thorough vetting process that essentially had been going on for 8-10 years had been passed. On that front, I think America has Singapore beat.
You can't actually compare apples to apples immigrants to Europe and immigrants to the United States because the way immigration is conceptualized into legal systems are quite different. For one, the US, in spite of what the president attempts to proclaim, absolutely has a jus soli system of granting citizenship in addition to a partial jus sanguinis system that makes the determination complicated when citizenship is passed paternally and hinges on the year of birth and legitimization/recognition by the father for a variable number of years. This means that not even every person born outside of the US and entered the country later in life is necessarily an immigrant, and also conceptually there's no such thing as "second generation immigrant", since if they are born outside of the country and do not have citizenship when entering the country with intention to stay, they are immigrants. Otherwise, they are not immigrants. While the determination of whether someone is a citizen or not is actually a potentially complicated process that requires a court to adjudicate, it's only really relevant as a defense to orders of removal in the domestic context, as otherwise it's a consular processing matter that is resolved before the person enters the country. Although how one's actual status may be determined in a variety of circumstances and ways, it results in what's effectively binary - you are an immigrant, or you are not. Contrary to popular usage, "illegal" or "undocumented" is not a descriptor that has a set legal meaning and some are in illegal status for very short periods of time due to bureaucratic inefficiencies, and others are effectively relegated to second class citizenship with literally no chance of adjusting their status, period. While these are meaningful distinctions to make when talking about the issue, when it comes to calculating economic impact, because entitlements are broadly speaking not available to those who do not have legal permanent residency at the very least, the binary, thanks to the legal fiction of 'status', creates a bright line that splits bot along "legal" and "illegal" but "immigrant" and "non-immigrant" in reality.
While thanks to legally enforced discrimination based on the distinct American construction of race and ethnicity there are economic advantages and disadvantages that on the whole affects those considered by the state to be part of said minority group, it's not discrimination that results in immigrants across the board being economically disadvantaged. The immigration policies of the country have in fact so favored educated, white collar migration that there's literally no viable legal way for unskilled or lower-skilled workers to migrate at all, and this has been true legally since the mid 1960s and enforced fully since the early 80s. In absolute numerical terms, the most disadvantaged groups in the country are actually, broadly speaking, the offspring of persons trafficked over via the Atlantic slave trade and those whose ancestors entered when the country officially had open borders (true for all until 1882, and to most Europeans until 1924). I understand that the policy does not resemble the policy of any European country today and so may not be intuitive to those who don't have in depth domain knowledge on the background and legal landscape, which includes most Americans. I know this because I have an Area Studies degree and have practiced immigration law and so while I can't tell you how to obtain a divorce, form a trust, or legally dodge taxes, this happens to be a niche that I worked full time in, and Cato's studies follow how the administrative agencies in charge of immigration and the demographics of migration in this country have decided to demarcate the population. Some of the legal language is copied verbatim from the 1880s but since congress refuses to implement meaningful fixes beyond addressing nonexistent problems since the Clinton administration, one has to work with the data that exists, not the data that we wish existed.
It also is quite obvious to anyone who actually knows how the system works. Everyone is required to pay income taxes federally and many on the state level as well, but immigrants do not receive most entitlements. Even those present legally are not entitled to the full slate of public entitlements that form the bulk of the deficit that grows year after year. Without social security numbers, they can nevertheless obtain taxpayer IDs (ITIN) that follow the same format, but do not generally have withholdings and do not benefit from tax credits except those that benefit their US citizen children, which of course are meant for, and really only sufficient, for their children. Most immigration benefits are funded by the applicants and are not cheap and with no guarantee that they will receive the benefits. It's accurate to say that many not only are many immigrants stuck in an eternal situation of taxation without representation, but in fact they are paying to fund their own persecution, coerced by the state of course. The ponzi-like structure of social security is kept afloat in part thanks to immigrants paying into it but unable to benefit from it later. While most who talk about taxation as theft are really speaking metaphorically, for immigrants who receive no benefits but are forced to pay for everyone else's and have no say in the matter at all, it's far more literal, and kafkaesque.
Your proposed methodology may very well be valid for Europe, but in America it would be essentially impossible to conduct a study on the entire population to begin with, and studies that uses heuristics show the opposite than what your assumptions indicate. Cato is a policy think tank and while its publications may be of interest to the general public, the focus is on promoting policies in the classical liberal tradition and meant for members of congress, federal and state government decision makers, and others who can influence policy. It's not their job to explain immigration law to people on twitter, and frankly, those people don't care about what the law actually is anyway. They ask questions clearly without understanding the context that the paper actually explains, and nobody is obligated to chew the meal they cooked for you as well, you know.
I am not aware of all the nuances of the immigration system, but legal and illegal seem a flawed but still somewhat useful measure. Though legal includes both farm workers and software developers and doctors, which makes it even less useful.
And that immigrants do not get most entitlements because the system doesn't work that way seems flawed. The official numbers say that there are 14 million illegal immigrants in the US, and the trustworthiness of those numbers is questionable. It is clear the system is not working properly.
And if Cato wants to talk in public Twitter they should expect questions and answers. And I'm not talking about trolls and haters, but when they respond to intelligent, respectful, high-quality comments from people who know about the subject, with snark and arrogance, with emotional arguments, and sleazy and disingenuous replies, pretending to not understand simple concepts, I don't believe that they are acting in good faith or care about the truth.
I understand that the US has Jus Solis and as such the children of immigrants are legally equivalent to the children of citizens, but that doesn't mean that the economic effect of the children of immigrants should be attributed to all citizens. There is an implicit question and answer of whether immigration is economically beneficial, and the effects of immigration include the children.
If the child of every immigrant raised the deficit by a hundred million one would be crazy to support immigration, even if the parents reduced the deficit by a million.
Not so in Cato's analysis. It would in fact make increasing immigration look better.
For this reason separating between the children of immigrants and non-immigrants would be the correct thing to do, even if legally they are the same. It would be more difficult to do but not impossible at all. If Congress does not collect the data, Cato could do it themselves, or convince Congress to collect it. It is not impossible, they just refuse because it would harm their favored proposal.
