Not related, but to add some woes of the american immigration system.
There is no instant green card.
If a truly extraordinary Indian-born person (say a Nobel laureate or olympic gold medalist) files for a green card today, they will be waiting for 7-10 years to get a green card. At this point, it may be worse too, because this category's priority date has not moved a single day in 8 months.
Please read about Dr. Shakil Afridi. The doctor who helped CIA find Laden has been in Pakistani prison for a decade plus now, on false drummed up charges.
Why are you sure that Pakistan is not supporting terrorists now, after decades and decades of evidence otherwise?
I know about him. Idk, if you ever lived in India, you'd know the govt puts people in jail on trumped up charges all the time. Pakistan is probably the same. And this guy did do a fake vaccination drive for a foreign power. Indian police would have dealt with him the same probably...
As for evidence, there isn't hard evidence that Pakistan supported Bin Laden. And I'd expect that after he was caught. The US, where many ministers and army personnel and intelligence chiefs were skeptical when he was found, eventually said there was no hard evidence linking Pakistan secret services to Bin Laden. They were so skeptical of this link that they didn't tell them the nature of the raid which found him, for fear of tipping him off.
I think it's just what it looks like on the surface. It looks suspicious, so that's why everyone was suspicious. But when we looked into it, it wasn't what it looked like.
I don't doubt Pakistan supports some proxy terrorists. That is what nearly every nation-state does these days. I just doubt they sheltered Bin Laden, worth far more to them in US hands than elsewhere, after seeing what they did in Afghanistan to the last group who sheltered him, way past his prime. That too while being good enough to scrub any evidence of the connection? I just don't think there's motive or proof of it
> It’s not like subpar research is ubiquitously getting funded over better research with lower “broader impacts” scores.
Yeah I don't buy that.
I've seen equity directives in universities explicitly asking to hire only underrepresented minorities, or give one third of a candidate's score based on race and gender characteristics (the other two thirds were resume and interview).
I've heard equity hiring quotas given to execs in tech industry. I've heard of pressure to hire/promote minorities.
I've seen what affirmative action did to University admissions. The admissions office reduced Asian Americans score on "likeability". As a result they needed a higher sat score than any other group for admissions. The hiring office essentially said that they did not like Asians.
So sorry, I do not buy the argument that equity initiatives just choose a minority representation from equally qualified samples. Because from what you say, Asian americans wouldn't have been discriminated against.
Coordinating medical information is notoriously hard, particularly when the government doesn't want to acknowledge something. Let's take Florida as an example.
There was a point at the beginning of the covid pandemic where the governor was declaring that the state only hand a few cases, and there was not great need for concern. The pneumonia death rates for the previous months showed a different story. For the previous two months the death rates were 10x higher that normal. Nobody seemed to have noticed that at the state level.
Most outbreaks follow a pattern where the disease shows up in small pockets for many years before it becomes an epidemic. HIV is an example. The first HIV death in the USA happened in 1969. The oldest confirmed case in Africa is in '59. The oldest suspected death in the US is '52.
Crossover tends to happen multiple times, and there is no reason to expect otherwise with covid-19. The problem with finding these cases is that it happened in an area governed by an authoritarian ruler. Authoritarians don't want to admit that there are things out of their control, and by inclination they conceal bad news, or news that makes them look like they're less than omnipotent. They shift blame rather than dealing with problem.
The love of the lab theory in the US seems to be driven by the same desire to push the blame on someone else. It takes the focus away from the incompetent response.
The pandemic was discovered by ordinary doctors in Wuhan who noticed the unusually high volume of sick and dying patients. Only then were specialists engaged to identify the cause, and the viral genome was first published by Zhang Yong-Zhen in Shanghai. The WIV isn't known to have played any role in this.
Perhaps the WIV secretly discovered the new virus by more sophisticated means before those doctors did. There's no evidence for this, but maybe. There is no possibility that a Wuhan-level outbreak occurred in a different city first, though. China keeps tight control of their mass media, but mortality on that level is impossible to conceal. Do you not remember 2020? The coffin shortages? So your implication that the WIV's presence somehow caused the first cases in a natural pandemic to get ascertained in Wuhan just doesn't make sense.
This topic is unfortunately politicized, and you're not helping. I think it would be helpful to spend more timing studying the scientific evidence, and less time speculating over the motivations of one's perceived ideological opponents.
I like how these people think the checkmate move is assume the person they’re talking to is a blind supporter of the USA for some reason, and have zero response when they realize that rationally applying the same rules to everybody really does mean Israel doesn’t pass the bar for a democracy.
Last I checked, loans with generous terms given to people were called to be cancelled because they were "exploitative." For ordinary people, it makes much more sense for aid to come from a more direct means.
> That "profit" is not commensurate to the risk that the govt took on.
That's because the bailouts was intended to stabilize the economy rather than to turn a profit.
>Last I checked, loans with generous terms given to people were called to be cancelled because they were "exploitative."
What do you mean by this exactly? I don't know what this is in reference to.
Never mind the case, the biggest problem with TARP isn't the money per se, its the lack of substantially increased regulation and teeth to enforce it. Executives and boardrooms should have been bankrupted as the government should have clawed back pay, personal assets, and bonuses to pay for the damage that was done. In another words, boardrooms and c-suites should have been humiliated and fired en masse, with prison time for those culpable.
That would have been a good start. TARP funds were handed out with no teeth. The senate hearings largely ended up being for show, and only a few executives were held feet to the fire and even so, it was brief.
Not to mention, how the heck are these people still allowed to work in finance at all.
