ALL HAIL PRESIDENT TRUMP

Do you know why Pablo got that job, Morbo?

It's because he was willing to take five dollars an hour to do that job, because he and his eight roommates can all pool their five dollars an hour to live in the same three-room apartment because doing that means they get jobs.

That's their offer, on the table. Pablo says "I'll take five bucks an hour, clan up with my homies, and live in conditions regular Americans would find unacceptable in order to get this job. Your move, 'Murica." How do you intend to compete with that?

By outlawing immigration (what a delightfully un-American notion, by the way)? Okay, let's assume you successfully do that. America becomes the next Imperial Japan nobody ever gets in or out. if you're born here you die here; if you're born somewhere else the only way you die here is if you're shot dead on our soil trying to sneak in. No more illegals, no Dirty Mexicans(C), no Indian Job Stealers, no nothing. 'Murica is for 'Muricans and that is FINAL

...what stops Big Corporate from simply doing what they've been doing anyways and physically moving the jobs elsewhere? We live in a global economy now, man. You can't stop companies from siting their facilities wherever they want. Punitive import/export tariffs simply choke trade and drive prices up for everyone. If a company has the choice of putting a factory here, with our tax code that makes them pay their fair share (or used to, anyways) and with our labor base that would like a standard of living worth calling "standard of living"...or putting their factory in Mexico where they can hire Pablo the $5/hour guy freely and legally and benefit from the fact that the Mexican government basically doesn't exist? Where do you think that factory is going?

Now. Let's assume for a moment that Trump continues to be Trump, the Republicans continue to hate poor people and love Big Corporate, and we get another tax code rebake that slashes corporate tax rates to the bone. Corporations basically don't have to pay taxes anymore; the cheapest place they can possibly put their factories on the entire planet is right here. Huzzah, jobs for everybody! Right?

Sure - but who gets to pay the taxes the corporations don't have to anymore? Here's a hint: it's us. Our own taxes go through the roof because we have to pay for the tax burden the government you people keep electing has decided to completely remove from Big Corporate's back. This means 'Murican workers need commensurately much higher wages because we're under a crippling tax burden, which means that the corporations paying us those wages are basically paying taxes anyways - they're just making us do it for them. This means more work for us, higher total costs of doing business here in the U.S. for Big Corporate, and thus we end up in the same god damned place - Five Dollar Pablo gets jobs because he's cheaper to employ than Ten Dollar Sam. Because Five Dollar Pablo is willing to live in conditions we, as the general American populace, are not.

Until Ten Dollar Sam can find a way to compete with Five Dollar Pablo on the corporate bottom line, no amount of slashing wellfare, slashing corporate taxes, restrictive import/export duties, or anything else will make Big Corporate hire Ten Dollar Sam over Five Dollar Pablo. Five DOllar Pablo isn't getting the job because he's a shifty, lying deceitful duplicitous bastard who's Out To Get You - he gets the job because he outbid you. He will continue to do so.

Don't like it? Then create a post-scarcity economy already where the idea of outbidding someone for a job is laughable on the face of it and everybody gets what they need and a chunk of what they want because they're entitled to it as a human being and we all work our five hours a week on maintaining the infrastructure equally. Because until we get there?

Five Dollar Pablo will continue to outbid Ten Dollar Sam because he'd rather get five dollars an hour and live with his eight roommates in a small apartment here than go back to Mexico and get killed to death by the drug gangs nobody has done anything about who've turned half the country into a Mad Max movie. Unskilled labor is driven almost entirely by cost concerns. Five Dollar Pablo will always be cheaper than Ten Dollar Sam and more willing to do shit work nobody else wants.

The very free-market principles 'Murican Repubs hold up so highly are what's driving the current labor issues in this country. You have to change those principles, which is never going to happen, or you have to change the core assumptions those principles are operating on, if you want to fix the problems those principles are leading us to.

That all being said? My sincere congratulations on the phrase "I do want to live in a social system, where people that can't (temoporarily) take care of themselves are being taken care of." Normally when I ask someone "okay. How many poor people are you willing to shoot in the face today?", they sputter and bluster and tell me I'm a bleeding-heart liberal idiot and nobody needs to die they just need to stop being lazy. You're a step above that level. Good on ya.

@1453R,

You are arguing like mass immigration of cheap labour into the US (or EU) was always a thing. It wasn't. How did Americans survive 50 years ago, with just one salary per family on average? The man was working, the woman was a housemaker and they could afford to have several kids. What changed in just 50-60 years? Why are westerners being fleeced by the governmet, have to have several jobs and still can't afford a family or house in the current year?

If what you are saying is true - that you have to either allow masses of immigrants in, or allow businesses to export work (and taxation) abroad, then the US is finished. You'll be replaced by mexicans and indians in a few generations. Your culture will be replaced by "cheaper" people, by people who are ok with 10 of them living in one room. That's the endgame of neoliberalism. And when mexicans will become too expensive for the neoliberal corporate regime, they'll be replaced by say nigerians, and so on, always searching for "cheaper people".

I don't want to kill anyone, but I also don't want to be fleeced by my governemnt, to support some foreign countries where they breed like crazy. I don't care about mexicans, they have their own country, culture and society to take care of. I wish them luck, but their problems are not my problems. I also don't want my taxes to go for neocon/neolib interventionist wars and "bringing democracy" to foreign lands.

With current trends the "post scarcity" situation people like to dream about, will never happen. The West will be swarmed by the thrid world and destroyed long before we develop "unlimited" resources for everyone to enjoy. Replace the West with China or Russia or whoever you prefer - no single country can take on all the problems of the planet. If every country would take basic care of their own people first, that'd be already a huge improvement. But with mass immigration you are not just screwing your own nation workers, you are also depleting the source country of intelligent & talented people - the so called "brain drain". This is happening and perpetuating inequality even on smaller scale, eg. between EU members.

Americans and Europeans are already under crippling taxation. Taxes for the middle class are so high because of big government social programs AND because our crony capitalist politicians allow tax avoidance to corporations. Tax avoidance can and should be legislated and prevented by the government (avoidance is not the same as evasion, which is already illegal). And for this to happen you need a nationalist government, not an inter-nationalist one. Because globalists don't care about specific people, their playground is the whole world and will jump from country to country, depends on where is currently more profitable for their interests.

So, yeah, build a wall, severely limit immigration, deport illegals, prevent "tax heavens" for corporations and incentivize businesses to stay home. Only then you can start dreaming about stuff like universal healthcare, social programs and "post scarcity society".

"

1453R wrote:

Do government benefits need reworking? Yes. Do they exist because employers, on the whole, are awful people? Also yes!

Let's understand what government does. Basically two things:
1) creates laws, then investigates, prosecutes and penalizes the violation thereof (or, more simply put, coerces certain behaviors) and
2) pays people, sometimes in exchange for something (ex: police, soldiers, judges) and sometimes not.

The latter is obviously expensive. The former is expensive if there's a lot of prosecution and incarceration, and inexpensive when a law successfully coerces people into not breaking it, reducing (but not entirely eliminating) the need for prosecution and incarceration.

So the only real cost-effective ways for government to operate are
1) as a business, paying people to work to generate a product — you know, like those corporations you hate, but with more monopolistic corruption — or
2) by using the coercive power of law to alter incentives such that people rarely engage in behaviors that were problematic before the law was enforced.

So what I'm saying here is that a good law changes a group of "awful people" into people who might not be any less awful in intent but, due to fear induced by legal coercion, become noticably less awful in behavior. An ideal legal system doesn't make psychopaths into non-psychopaths, but it does cause psychopaths to reevaluate their options and behave in a socially beneficial, or at least socially acceptable, manner. If selfishness is the motor behind the invisible hand locomotive of Adam Smith, laws are the tracks that guide it.

So now that we understand what government does, we can ask whether it is the right tool for a particular job, or not.

If the problem is employers are awful people, ask yourself: how does this government program change the incentives to make employers behave less awfully? In the case of benefit programs, it seems to me it only increases their incentive to let someone go and let the taxpayer handle it — after all, the person they fire won't die, right? "They'll live, they'll be fine," the corporatist shill HR manager says to get herself to sleep at night. Could you imagine the nightmares that bitch would have if she heard news of people starving in the streets?

Imagine if, instead of prosecuting rapists, our governments implemented this massive benefit program to reward the victims of rape. Would that make you feel like your government had the rape problem under control? Or would you expect an increase in not only the number of false rape claims, but an increase in the number of real rapes as well? Or do you really think there won't be any sick bastards out there who think to themselves, "hey, I'm not only getting off, I'm putting money in her pocket too"? Or maybe "there's so many fakers out there, no one will believe her"?

The sad truth (or sour redpill, if you prefer) is that benefit programs enable the misbehavior they're trying to help. Rewarding victimhood doesn't change incentive systems to avoid becoming a victim — indeed the opposite — but they make things easier for the victimizers by distributing the cost of their malfeasance from huge hits on isolated victims to mosquito-bite drains on the entire sleeping populace. On that note: do you see any major corporations lobbying against unemployment benefits or food stamps? Yeah, I didn't think so.

If you can find de facto shitty behavior a corporation is involved in, publicize it. If grassroots boycotts aren't enough, maybe a new law is in order to change corporate incentive structures such that the old, nasty way they used to do things now has a big neon "no profit here!" sign over it. But please, stop trying to rob from everyone, including those doing things right, just to pay for settlements for the victims.

I mean, you're pissed off about Conyers, aren't you? Well welfare is the same damn thing, on a much more massive scale. "Hey, sorry we dicked you. Here, take this money... Now kindly shut the fuck up." I mean, look at Saudi Arabia — a real, honest-to-god UBI success story. But why?

The issue is that United States laws can only affect United States people, or entities within the United States. Overseas tax havens are overseas tax havens specifically because it is very difficult for the governments/countries these places are preying on to do a single damned thing about them. Oh sure, you can levy huge fines and penalties and malfeasance punishments against anyone who knowingly deals with such places, but all that does is drive the business into back rooms - they have to know you're doing business with tax havens before they can crack you for doing business with tax havens, and these are already places that specialize in obfuscation.

This is exactly what I was arguing in broader part in the other thread before Pannra ruined it - the profit motive is at once the best way to move society, to give people a stake in improving their lives and the lives of others, and also the single greatest source of evil in this world. Because for every single honest guy who only wants to run his little business, or put his cool invention/idea out there and make clean money selling it to people who want it, there are a hundred psychotic sharkmen in business suits who will game the rules to their absolute limit to squeeze every last dirty dollar they can no matter how many people they're harming or how badly they're twisting society as a whole. And they will protest all the while with a straight face that they're not breaking any rules, everything they're doing is perfectly legal. And the absolute worst part is that more often than not, they're right.

These are people who invest millions of dollars and man-hours into finding every last possible loophole they can, into twisting and contorting any system of rules they're presented with however they have to in order to squeeze more fucking money out of it. They let Five Dollar Pablo outbid Ten Dollar Sam because that's more money, even though they know that Five Dollar Pablo isn't making enough money to lead a proper life. They prop up these systems everyone hates because those systems feed money into their pockets, or allow them to not have to pay money into anyone else's pockets.

You think I like people gaming welfare, or people desperately trying to get off welfare only for Corporate to keep smacking them down? Of course not. But the difference is that I feel like letting people die in the streets in droves by tearing down these systems and then doing nothing else is both immoral to a degree I cannot rightly fathom, but also not actually going to solve the problem. All that gets you is corporations gleefully shouting from the rooftops how much better they are than you - despite the fact that they could all fix this any time they wanted - and then possibly bloody hellfire and revolution.

People need to stop blaming Five Dollar Pablo for STEHLIN' DEHR JERHBS. Five Dollar Pablo did no such thing - he outbid you for that job because he was more desperate for it than you were. People need to start blaming the corporations that continue to engage in this toxic, self-destructive behavior. Telling everyone else in the world "sorry guys, but America First - we really hate to say it but all of you can pretty much just rot and die" does you no good when corporations are free to move their business, and all their paying jobs, to whatever place is the cheapest.

You want to tear down welfare? Cool. Marry that notion to a massive overhaul of the corporate legal code, and marry that effort to a body designed to be agile and proactive in maintaining that legal code and crushing loopholes and abuses as soon as they crop up. If you say that the only thing government does is use the threat of coercion to incentivize or disincentize behaviors? Well then we'd best get on that shit.

* * *

Some scientists out there predict complete global collapse in less than fifty years - that the lifestyles we've built in first-world countries like this one is unsustainable and eventually we'll hit critical overpopulation and resource exhaustion. The world will crack, buckle, and shatter, and if anyone survives we'll all be back to muscle-powered subsistence farming communities forever. I'm not sure if I believe them, but the signs are certainly there, ne? And if they're right - if we're on a fast track to Ragnarok and the end of modern civilization - do you really think it's because nobody told Five Dollar Pablo he needs to get a job in Mexico, not the U.S.?

Or is it because we keep letting corporate fucking shark people do whatever they like, no matter how ruinous it is for everyone else?

"

1453R wrote:

the profit motive is at once the best way to move society, to give people a stake in improving their lives and the lives of others, and also the single greatest source of evil in this world. Because for every single honest guy who only wants to run his little business, or put his cool invention/idea out there and make clean money selling it to people who want it, there are a hundred psychotic sharkmen in business suits who will game the rules to their absolute limit to squeeze every last dirty dollar they can no matter how many people they're harming or how badly they're twisting society as a whole. And they will protest all the while with a straight face that they're not breaking any rules, everything they're doing is perfectly legal. And the absolute worst part is that more often than not, they're right.

And as I was saying before: selfishness is the motor, incentives are the tracks. I don't blame people for being selfish, in fact I count on them to be. I view selfishness as an electrician views a source of electricity; to wax Marxist about the so-called evils of capitalist self-interest reeks of almost Luddite superstition to me. It is the height of folly to desire can world with Puritanical prohibitions on profit motive — the future WILL be powered by individual selfishness.

What matters is the incentives and how the collective self-interest flows through them like a circuit.

I don't like protectionist immigration policy. If there is a job that pays $20/day and someone is willing to work for that*, using immigration laws to stop them from doing so is immoral.

Immigration, however, should care about improving the country as a whole. Allowing people in with no skills or education to speak of, that don't have ties to people here, and that haven't done their due diligence on understanding our (unique) laws is a mistake. Doing so is a recipe for adding to the welfare burden and increasing crime. If we have the opportunity to pick and choose** who we let in, we should let in the best.

I understand the argument that we should take in everyone, but I disagree with it for as long as our impoverished class is growing (i.e. we already have a humanitarian goal to meet). There is also a relationship between welfare laws and immigration laws. To the extent that our welfare increases, our immigration should reduce (and vice versa).

We are and will likely continue to be the #1 country for immigration, but there's a lot to discuss without jumping to "ALL IMMIGRATION" or "NO IMMIGRATION".

---

There are two huge digressions/side-issues to mention.

*) Paying someone under the table and skirting labor law is already a crime, and businesses that do so should be taken to the cleaners. We talk about five dollar Pablo, but the business paying him that little has already broken labor laws.

At the moment, neither party is willing to change the status quo by enforcing laws already on the books since it's making them money hand over fist.

**) Illegal immigration is wrong. Nobody is more maligned than legal immigrants whose blood, sweat, and tears went into the immigration process. Disliking a process doesn't allow people to ignore it, and those here illegally should be deported with maximum haste. For the most part, this is already happening, first with Obama and now with Trump, and "self-deportation" is also on the rise.

"

pneuma wrote:

I don't like protectionist immigration policy.

"

1453R wrote:

We live in a global economy now, man. You can't stop companies from siting their facilities wherever they want. Punitive import/export tariffs simply choke trade and drive prices up for everyone. If a company has the choice of putting a factory here, with our tax code that makes them pay their fair share (or used to, anyways) and with our labor base that would like a standard of living worth calling "standard of living"...or putting their factory in Mexico where they can hire Pablo the $5/hour guy freely and legally and benefit from the fact that the Mexican government basically doesn't exist? Where do you think that factory is going?

I have mixed feelings on protectionism.

On the one hand, 1453R points out how, assuming global "free" trade, it's basically impossible for one nation to, say, implement a minimum wage law — if the minimum wage is $10, all the $5 jobs leave the country. I don't, however, agree with 1453R's baseless claim that choking trade is always a bad thing. Simply put, if you want ANY laws to apply to trade AT ALL, you either
1) allow free trade with nations where the law doesn't exist, so a business can just outsource to that location and ignore your law, or
2) restrict trade with nations where the law doesn't exist.

So if you're simultaneously for global "free" trade and for a higher statutory minimum wage, what that combination means, in practice, is "I want to force jobs out of this country." Because that's all the combination means in practice. You can't have both "free" trade and statutory minimum wage increases; choose one.

Now, one might argue whether things like minimum wage laws are even worth legalizing. Although I think it's a good question, it assumes a certain public will in the field of economics. What if the majority of the people want statutory minimum wage increases? Should we just tell them we're the philosopher kings, not them, so they can fuck off? I don't think so. So I'm leaving open the possibility of laws that would make businesses want to outsource somewhere, combined with protectionism to prevent them from actually doing so. (To be clear: these are things protectionism justifies.)

That said, in practice the only protectionism I'm in favor of is to prevent unfair "burst competition." What I mean by burst competition is: you have one entity engaged in a stable economic policy that can be perpetuated into the foreseeable future, while a competing entity is engaged in an obviously unsustainable economic policy that manages to outperform in the short term. For example, you could argue that a slavery-based economy might have a burst-competition advantage over an economy that prohibits slavery.

However, I'm pretty much against any other rationale for protectionism (to be clear: things that justify protectionism). If a certain foreign economic policy offers them a permanent competitive advantage, the solution isn't to protect against it; it's to adopt that policy oneself. And obviously if a certain foreign economic policy offers them a competitive disadvantage, there's nothing to protect against.

So basically, I'm for protectionism against foreign countries that are engaged in policies that grant them short-term economic gain at the expense of their long-term prospects, and against it otherwise. For example, going massively into debt as part of an economic stimulus package. That shit isn't fair, and will catch up with you eventually.

"

1453R wrote:

Telling everyone else in the world "sorry guys, but America First - we really hate to say it but all of you can pretty much just rot and die" does you no good when corporations are free to move their business, and all their paying jobs, to whatever place is the cheapest.

Are you saying that Mexicans cannot survive without America? That they will just die, without US leaving the door wide open for mass (illegal) immigration? I hope not. Because several countries in human history have proven that you can create a wealthy paradise without 1.) leeching from others, 2.) imperialism, 3.) having any natural resources. -> eg. South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Germany...

Secondly, no, corporations are not just free to move or do anything they wish. They are bound by country laws. Only when the country governemnt allows them to do X, they can do X. You keep forgetting that for crony capitalism to exist you need the government to be complicit in whatever the corporation wants to do:

* In US you buy politician favours by funding their election campaigns
* In Africa you directly bribe gov. officials with cash on hand
* In China you bow down to the dictatorship and allow state surveilance into your services

That's how the corporation and the government are washing each other's hand to screw the people. I blame the gov more, because the gov exists to serve the people, while the corporation is a private entity. You are rightfully focusing on "muh capitalist pigdogs" and completely forgetting about "muh corrupt politician". Anyway, no one is blaming "Pablo" for doing what is in his best interest, we (at least I am) are blaming politicians for not doing what is in our nation's best interest.


------------------------------------------------
(˘ general observations not aimed at anyone in particular)

Speaking about personal morality, where are all the latte commies and affluent liberals, I don't see them rioting in the streets against mega-tax evader corporations like Apple or Google. Taxes that could be used to help the poor are not being collected. In fact I see starbucks commies doing the opposite - flaunting their Apple products, instead of boycotting them.

If only liberals would spend 1% of their time rioting against Trump, boycotting all the tax-evading multi-billion-dolla' corporations, that'd be great ;)

"

morbo wrote:

...
Are you saying that Mexicans cannot survive without America? That they will just die, without US leaving the door wide open for mass (illegal) immigration? I hope not. Because several countries in human history have proven that you can create a wealthy paradise without 1.) leeching from others, 2.) imperialism, 3.) having any natural resources. -> eg. South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Germany...
...

Remarking on this specifically and the rest generally. To start with:

No, this isn't what I'm saying. What I meant with the given comment is the Trumpist policy of abandoning any semblance of global responsibility, making decisions that actively fuck over the rest of the world in return for a meaningless short-term maybe-benefit to the American people (Paris Agreement, anyone?), and generally just mooning the global stage completely because certain people who just so happened to stumble into the Presidency can't live without a Them to rally up his 'Us' base against.

Yes, the United States should take care of its own peoples and its own responsibilities first. Why this sentiment has suddenly come to mean "we should all shoot two Mexicans in the face per week!" or "let's start up more COAL PLANTS! That's a sustainable and totally clean power resource!" or "hey here's an idea, let's start backing out of EVERY SINGLE LAST AGREEMENT OR ALLIANCE we've made in the last hundred years!", I do not know. But it's a shitty idea, and I know who to blame for it.

This is not the way to Make America Great Again(TM).

Anyways.

@Scrotie et al.: I suppose my position could be summed up as "everything becomes poisonous in excess". Plenty of people are accusing me of all kinds of neo-badthingism, being a communist Nazi liberal cronyiser (what even is that, by the way?)...but boiled down to essentials I'm actually easy to understand - people can make as much profit as they very well please until that profit comes at the expense of others. Your local mom-and-pop joints, small town or small regional businesses, seem to understand this inherently for the most part (because they're run by people, not corporate sharkmen), but above a certain level of Business Size you start getting involved with people, policies, and decision structures that take "the expense of others" as a granted, given thing. The whole "you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs" bit; the Big Corporate version might well be "you can't make a Profit without ruining some lives."

Do I know how to Fix Everything, stop crony capitalism, put an end to businesses turning politicians sour (BTW Marbo, see the other thread for my stance on that one. To wit: politicians are not born corrupt, they're made that way by being paid to be corrupt - and there's only one set of people that can consistently foot the bill for bad politicos, isn't there?), and figure out how to get everyone a non-shit job at non-shit pay for non-shit people? Not even remotely. If I did I'd quit this job and run for office somewhere.

What I do know is that pretending the greater global economy, and the global sociocultural climate which underpins and overlays the global economy, doesn't exist and we can all do so much better by flipping it all the bird is rankest stupidity. We're not alone on this mudball. Acting like we are, or like we want to be but everyone else keeps getting in the way, is ridiculous.

There's this big copper statue over in New York somewhere with some words on it that people used to think were kind of a big deal. I think they went something like "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free". There was once a time where this was considered kind of a core American value - come here, work hard, be free and make a new life for yourself. The country as a whole was supposed to get stronger that way, or at least I think that was the way it worked, right? People come here, contribute to the country, and we retain the best elements of all the cultures that wash up on our shores?

Certainly illegal immigration is illegal and should be dealt with, but all this talk of closing borders, of pulling a Brexit and shooting off our own feet to make sure them Damn Dirty Furrinners(C) can't step on our toes...I legitimately don't understand it. Where on that big copper statue does it say "Give us your best, your brightest, and the rest can fuck off"?

Is that really a thing? Are we that worried about Five Dollar Pablo?

"

1453R wrote:

Yes, the United States should take care of its own peoples and its own responsibilities first. Why this sentiment has suddenly come to mean "we should all shoot two Mexicans in the face per week!" or "let's start up more COAL PLANTS! That's a sustainable and totally clean power resource!" or "hey here's an idea, let's start backing out of EVERY SINGLE LAST AGREEMENT OR ALLIANCE we've made in the last hundred years!", I do not know.

You don't know why you freak out about hyperbole that you yourself create? I suggest figuring that out on your own time.

---

Immigration policy is not a solved problem. Nobody knows what the best thing to do is, hence why we discuss it. Immigration policy has changed massively, many times since "The New Colossus" was written; the poem itself being one of many arguments about what is the most correct immigration policy.

For instance, one year before that poem was the Chinese Exclusion Act preventing all Chinese from immigrating as laborers. Two and four years after that poem were the Alien Contract Labor laws which similarly restricted who could immigrate, then five years after that poem was the Scott Act which stopped Chinese from re-immigrating after being deported.

For more recent examples, we have immigration caps; numbers of people that are allowed per year. Given the existence of a cap, would you rather admit the best, a random sampling, what? It's completely up for discussion, though I feel that admitting the best (i.e. most able to take care of themselves without government assistance) seems like the obviously correct choice since it allows the most resources to go toward helping those already here.

There's also the difference between refugees and immigrants. Both are capped, but the incentives are different -- refugees are admitted in terms of how much we can help them, immigrants are admitted in terms of how much they can help us.

Mostly, I just wish you wouldn't freak out unnecessarily. The constant hyperbole can't possibly be good for you or anyone else. We will continue to receive more immigrants than any other country in the world by at least a factor of 3 and discuss what, if anything, we ought to change. Ideally by looking at data instead of just quoting poetry.