> So, since I'm away from my own home and have some time to spare, what does that mean in terms of KirinDave's idea to keep entry-level jobs for Americans? I'll be blunt: that's stupid. Americans, who have to earn a certain wage to maintain even the lowest standard of living, can never be as cost-effective as people to whom that same wage looks like a king's ransom.

That's uh.. not my idea? You mention me a lot here but you've comically misrepresented my position, which you can't really know because the only thing I've articulated on this subject in this thread is that Tesla tried and failed spectacularly to automate, and that the American (really Victorian) idea of trying to replace all human labor with machines (or at least make it LOOK like it's all machines) hasn't fared very well overall despite it being a near religious conviction by many western industrialists.

Meanwhile, China's labor policies (which in my personal belief system lead to reprehensible limitations on human freedom and rights) lead to a country that is industrially crushing the rest of the world to a degree that we haven't seen since post-WW2 where American interests could push their products on others because everyone else's industrial bases were smoking craters due to war.

> That's where "merit based" immigration comes in. It's about making the best and the brightest from all over the world part of our ecosystem instead of a competing one. It's a deliberate brain drain.

You misspelled "richest", because that's actually the goal. We're getting tepid, moderately talented but quite wealthy Elon Musks. Once, we were significantly better at the "brain drain" and it showed during WW2. And perhaps that's for the best, because the circumstances that lead to the genuine brain drains of WW2 were quite dire.

> It leaves the low-skill workers where they are, unable to compete job by job but also bereft of any leadership that would enable them to compete industry by industry.

But at the end of the day, the notion that the folks you are leaving behind are not essential to society as a whole is a capitalist dogma not supported by reality. The idea that society isn't built on essential but socially dismissed and denigrated labor like construction, cleaning , and even sex work is a fantasty. It's the Victorian desire to have a "dumb waiter" all over again, only on a much larger scale. And this myth largely persists because western industrialists imagine a fantasy world in which Taiwan and China are full of magic robots and not millions of skilled (and socially oppressed) humans.

> It's unfair - one might even say cruel - to them, but global fairness is not a goal.

Indeed. The goal is to realize Burke's dream and roll back every social contract change post-French Revolution. I'm well read on the capitalist ethos.

> It's an effective way to promote Trump's and KirinDave's goal of propping up uneducated Americans' wages.

Trump's goal is to prop up the wages of under-educated Americans? What? The man and his party's policies have rendered over half of the farmers in America desperate, directly threatened the livelihood of many American manufacturing workers with his pointless tariffs, and outright declared war on American unions. He is as anti-worker as they come. The fact that you think otherwise is a reflection of the phenomenal branding engine.

> I just happen to think that's a lousy goal, not least because it's not sustainable. The longer we put it off, the worse the eventual result will be.

I'm not sure what you're advocating at all. The completely abandonment and disenfranchisement of every skilled laborer that doesn't meet your definition of "educated?" The radical purging or forced labor of anyone who doesn't meet specific economic or physical standards? Many US States already do that via their justice system. Does that not already satisfy you?

If you want to talk about unsustainable systems, we need only look at the current political environment in America, where voters are so disenfranchised, misinformed and manipulated that a toxic hyperindustrialst grifter can hold power just because folks are so pissed at the status quo that hope of massive disruption is all they can hold on to.

Eventually, folks are gonna stop believing in all the delays. Already, fascists interests in the US are gathering people who've hit that breaking point and organizing them to point at perceived enemies. Already, we see people who question truths known and trivially observable for thousands of years because they're so convinced the entire system is out to get them. Already, folks know that their punishments for challenging the rule of law are only truly enforced towards the poor and the forgotten.