We know what’s coming and we are prepared.
🚷 🇳🇱 📊 Die Welt has an interview with a co-author of the groundbreaking Dutch study on the net economic costs of immigration, which has sparked a huge controversy in the Netherlands. The top line finding is that immigration has cost
🔶️ the Dutch state an average of €17 billion per year since 1995, mainly in providing generous welfare benefits to unemployed migrants. Work migrants from Western (blue) & non-Western (black) are the only net contributors. Asylum seekers are the biggest net drain.
🔶️ The other finding is that migrants who don't integrate into the labor market stay in the Netherlands the longest, along with migrants who arrive for family reunification. Immigrants who adapt successfully tend to take their skills and leave the Netherlands,
🔶️ often heading to the US or UK where salaries are higher and taxes lower. Study co-author Jan H. van de Beek describes the system as a sort of welfare magnet in which the least-integrated immigrants stay the longest and cost Dutch taxpayers the most.
🔶️ The University of Amsterdam, which employs some of the study's authors and helped finance it, has since distanced itself from the study, since pointing to any downsides of immigration, no matter obvious and empirically demonstrable, is still taboo among mainstream circles.
🔶️ This, of course, is part of what drives European voters to populist-right parties -- the disconnect between what they see and experience every day and the airbrushed world within the "opinion corridor" (to use the Swedish term) of opinions deemed socially acceptable.
🔶️ Given what we know about immigration in Germany, the results of a major study like the Dutch one would yield nearly identical results here. Which is why it will very likely never happen. The objective reality of the effects of German immigration policy would be too disturbing.
📎 Andrew Hammel
Yanis Varoufakis (former Greek Minister of Finance) describes AI as a new form of capital that produces not goods, but behavioral modification. This is achieved by engineering perceptions.
The answers provided by ChatGPT, or the images rendered by StableDiffusion — as these increasingly inform our perceptions, they in turn define the reality we experience.
This is what makes AI so powerful — he who controls the AI, defines the reality of tomorrow.
⚡️🇺🇸 Some more things coming out for the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).
Under the preliminary drafts of the bill, the USAF is requesting a release of $57,000,000 USD ($57.0 Million) to retire all remaining 162 A-10 Thunderbolt IIs in current service. Apart of the 2023 NDAA, there was a clause for a few million dollars to be released every so often to gradually retire the (then) 250 airframes by 2034; however due to the push by the Dept of Defense to ‘shed’ obsolete or obsolescent airframes that cannot be overhauled or upgraded further without a whole new airframe, it appears the USAF wants to retire all 162 remaining A-10s by the end of 2026.
The USAF plans to fully divest the 340-total remaining A-10s entirely, including those that currently serve in a handful of Air National Guard units in some states; which will be replaced by F-15EX Eagle IIs (like what is already happening with the Michigan State Air National Guard’s A-10s), or F-35A/Bs.
Included ...
My older sister lives in the country in between Velma Oklahoma and Duncan Oklahoma near the Fuqua Lake area, this story was told by a rural mail delivery woman who delivers the mail in the country.
The incident happened while she was on her route, when she came upon to the mailbox a male Chinese nation came out brandishing a, AK-47 rifle being very hostile,
I don't know if he pointed it at her since it is against the law to do so but she was terrified and said she was never going back and that the location that had a guard tower. Was the sheriff department notified, I don't know, did she notify her supervisor, don't know. But word is from the country folk who live in the area they have seen the guard tower at the pot place;
I refuse to call it a farm because it is an insult to farmers.
And yes she was traumatized by that ordeal
