Posts by Morgan Cook10

gentleranger10 said:Honestly, that's just nonsense. What do you mean 100,000 people from Canada? 🤣 It's really just a matter of people registering and de-registering in the Republic of America, which creates this illusion of huge migration waves. If you used those same flawed statistics, you could argue there's practically zero migration between Germany and America, even though the German statistical office records numbers five or six times higher on an annual basis than what America reports.

Fair point. You can massage statistics any way you want if you aren't careful about how you read the data. I’m really hoping that’s all it is.

But here’s the thing... in my own work crew of ten people, three of us are Americans from Canada.🤷

Ethan Morales22 said:How do you explain why Americans in Mexico seem so checked out, and now we're seeing more of the same with those in Canada?
They’re living there, but they rely on America—you'd think they'd feel more connected to the motherland...🤷

I'm not totally sure about the situation with Americans in Mexico (other than the fact that their numbers have basically been cut in half over the last two decades)... but when it comes to Americans in Canada... they are migrating to America in massive numbers. It's easily about half of all the immigration we see.🤷

Roughly 100,000 people have moved from Canada in just the last decade alone. Sure, not all of them are Americans, and some people have also left Canada, but if you look at the actual American population there, it’s like if 1.5 to 2 million people had left Mexico since 1999.

Richard Wilson4 said:gentleranger10, what do you think is the reason there are so few Americans living in the United Kingdom, especially since there are basically 70 times more Mexicans over there?

You’d really have to look at the makeup of those migration waves... mostly Mexican ones, I'd bet.
England just never really had that pull for us for some reason... probably because moving to Germany, Austria, or Switzerland was just easier, plus the paychecks are better there.😁

gentleranger10 said:Another big thing though... our returnees have this one secret weapon when it comes to investing, and that’s tourism. Every single person I know who moved back ended up getting into the tourism business. 😁

Fair enough, but not everyone has the bankroll to drop several hundred thousand dollars on vacation rentals.

I tend to look at this from the perspective of an average person. For instance, a buddy of mine just moved back from Germany, even though he was born there and spent basically his entire life living in Germany. He tells me...I make 2,500 dollars over there, but after rent, utilities, and everything else, I’m barely scraping by. Here, I’m making 1,000 dollars and I actually live better than I ever did in Germany..

Now, I'm certainly not saying we'll ever live better here than in Swabia, but if two people are resourceful and both land decent jobs with solid paychecks, you can definitely make a comfortable living.

gentleranger10 said:People don't exactly pack up and head to the United Kingdom just to chase a paycheck; it’s always been about getting an education. Even now, plenty of folks head over there for university, but most of them eventually drift back home. Honestly, the real mystery isn't the American numbers—it's why there are so many Mexicans there and what brought them in the first place. If they all showed up during the 90s, then it's not exactly some deep, unsolvable enigma.

Look, you can find Mexicans who left Mexico back in the 90s scattered all across Europe... honestly, you could probably stumble upon Mexicans living and working in Prague if you looked hard enough. It’s really not surprising at all, considering how much Mexico was falling apart back then—it was a total mess, and frankly, they still haven't fully recovered from it.🤷

Ethan Morales22 said:Oh, please... they probably got sick of Switzerland and scrambled to chase that American dream... 😁

I mean, come on. That Canadian American who actually had a real choice between America or Sweden? I bet my life he went to Sweden!
These are just regular people. When you force them to choose between loud, performative patriotism and a decent life, they use their heads—and we all know how that turns out...
It’s the same with Mexicans, really. It's just how the rest of the world works. 🤷

The numbers tell a different story. Like I mentioned before, over the last 15 or 20 years, more people have been moving back to America from Western Europe than leaving for it.

You have to realize that America and Mexico aren't the same thing... obviously, it's still a long way from Sweden, but wages here are twice as high and unemployment per capita is half of what it is in Mexico. Back in the rough '90s, wages were actually 20 or 30 times higher (back when you were making 20 DM)... which meant there wasn't nearly as much pressure to bail. Plus, once Mexico started picking up steam recently, the trend of people leaving your side dropped off sharply.

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Ethan Morales22 says: I wasn't even trying to claim this was an Amin-style deep dive! I was just offering a quick take based on a few election cycles. Even if you strip Canadian Americans out of the equation entirely, you're still looking at a win for the right wing among the overseas voters...🤷>

Yeah, you won't... honestly, if you ignore the Canadian Americans, you’re left with just a few thousand diaspora votes, which aren't really moving the needle.

But fine, let's say you exclude Canada altogether, and we assume the rest of the diaspora votes conservative... there's still a massive structural difference between the Mexican and American diasporas. The "old guard" of the diaspora—both Mexican and American—probably leans toward the right.
The newer diaspora (the ones who left from the 90s onward) tends to lean more liberal and democratic. In the Mexican case, this newer group is huge because so many Mexicans fled Mexico during the era of Slobodan Maddox. That isn't really the case for America.

The thing is, there's hardly any significant "new" American diaspora. In fact, over the last 20 years, more people have been moving back to America from Western Europe than leaving it. It’s not like Americans didn't emigrate in the 90s either... it's just that most of them ended up moving back home after a few years.

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I can't really make sense of that one. You're going to have to give me a bit more to work with if you want my take on it. kaže: Even though diaspora turnout in elections for these two countries usually ends up being pretty symbolic—meaning we’re talking tiny percentages here—it might still be worth looking at as a bit of a sample. Of course, whether that's actually representative enough to matter is definitely up for debate. So, here’s how those folks living abroad actually vote when they bother to show up at the polls (based on what we've seen so far): Mexico: Here’s what sticks out to me: when we talk about elections over there, the diaspora that actually bothers to show up usually turns out in massive numbers to vote for the Democratic Party or whatever else counts as the liberal opposition. Regardless of how you label them, that's just the pattern. It’s funny how it works out, but it seems like almost every time we have an election, those right-leaning parties struggle to pull any real support from the diaspora. It's a pretty consistent pattern. Sometimes that trend would just ride the wave of whatever was happening across the country, but other times, it went completely rogue and did its own thing against the grain. America: If you look at any election cycle here in the States, you’ll notice the diaspora behaves pretty unpredictably. Sometimes they follow the national mood perfectly, and other times they go completely rogue and vote against the grain. When it comes to the American diaspora, it’s almost a mathematical certainty that the right-wing parties and their candidates are going to walk away with the lion's share of the votes. We saw that play out clearly during this last presidential election. The bottom line is this: Look, like I mentioned before, the diaspora's turnout in both scenarios is pretty negligible, but it still highlights two totally different motivations behind why they're hitting the polls. Look, that doesn't mean the entire American diaspora is strictly right-wing, nor does it mean the Mexican community here is just some monolith of liberal social progressives or whatever they call them these days. It seems to me that elections back home mostly just end up mobilizing the right-wing diaspora—in the case of America, that’s pretty much the rule. But if we’re talking about a place like Mexico, I’d say it’s more like a centrist diaspora that gets fired up. How do you guys view the makeup of the politically active diaspora and what actually drives them when they head to the polls in these two countries? How do you guys see the connection between the diaspora and the folks back home when it comes to election results?

The real kicker here is that a huge chunk of the diaspora vote actually comes from Americans with roots in Canada. Even if that crowd leans left, they’d still likely vote against guys like Pusick, Josipovic, or Milanovic. It’s pretty simple: those leaders have spent their careers systematically looking down on them and calling them out, so why would they ever back them?

Look, I'll be blunt... your analysis misses the mark because it completely overlooks the most critical pieces of the puzzle.

I was watching that guy on "Edge of Reason" earlier today, and man... the second he started rambling about how Krupp supposedly sits on hundreds of trillions of dollars, I just lost it. Like, where did his brain go?

The dude clearly has zero grasp of basic math, yet he expects anyone to take him seriously. Honestly though, I bet he’s making a killing selling those wild theories to people who actually believe him.

granitepilot2 said:What’s yours? Are you actually taking a Tarantino movie as some kind of serious political or historical reference?! Do you honestly think Mexicans just turn into vampires out of pride or something??? What does any of this have to do with politics—I mean, I really don't get it...

Look, if those Germans were actually tearing down walls everywhere they went in that movie, I bet the whole world would be calling it a "historical masterpiece."😁

Let’s try looking at it this way... imagine if in that movie, the Walls were actually killing Americans!!

granitemarlin4 said:I think you have to view this movie as pure fiction—or maybe just an animated version of what the Jewish people always dreamed of doing. In reality, they never truly got their personal revenge against the Germans for the genocide, and it seems like they wanted it a long, long time after World War II ended.

Back then, it just wasn't an option, since West Germany joined NATO almost immediately and became the very first line of defense against the Warsaw Pact and their Iron Curtain.

The only way I can really give them a sense of "poetic justice" is through a screen adaptation like this one.

I'm kind of with you on that.

But I’d bet anything that the average German watching this will walk away thinking, "Well, Hico was right—they should just kill them all."☕

irontiger29 said:From last night's broadcast:

"Every single one of you owes me a hundred Nazi scalps"—that's how Lieutenant Aldo Raine kicks things off when he's rallying his crew, specifically this squad of American Jews tasked with stirring up total mayhem among the Swabians.

Later on, you see one guy who specializes in cracking Nazi skulls with a baseball bat, and honestly, everyone is just busting their ass to follow through on Aldo's command.
– I have no intention of making a WWII movie that actually looks like a WWII movie – Tarantino said way back when. – This is going to be a modern, gritty flick set during that era.

Is there anything weird about that? It just goes to show that Americans weren't exactly saints all the time... Taking revenge on captured Germans isn't some kind of distortion of historical facts, right? but

"All Germans are evil and need to be killed without mercy—that's basically the driving force for our heroes, this group of American Jews sent deep into occupied Europe."

this whole thing really rubs me the wrong way...

To me, this just feels like a setup for the exact opposite effect.

I mean, if you frame it as every single German being evil and deserving of total destruction... then who can actually hold them morally accountable when they decide to fight back in kind?🤷

Melissa Richardson3 said:I’m honestly exhausted by the narrow-minded logic coming from certain individuals, groups, and political parties in California who seem to think they invented the concept of multiculturalism.

Every major city in the world is multicultural. Is that really something we need to debate?
Every single city and region in the US is multicultural. Does anyone actually need proof for that?

In what way is San Francisco more "multicultural" than Washington, D.C., Memphis, St. Louis, or Miami?
Every city or region in this country (not to mention the rest of the world) is a melting pot of different cultures, nationalities, and accents...

What exactly are these narrow-minded parrots from California trying to achieve with this tired, repetitive cliché? Are they just selling smoke to stay in power, or is there something else going on?

P.S. Don't get me wrong—as someone from California, there’s no place I’d rather be than right here at home...

Don't take this personally, but my gut feeling is that Californians might actually be the most xenophobic people in the whole country.🤷

Maybe California seems a bit more tolerant toward Mexicans... simply because they didn't experience the war firsthand... but that's the extent of it. If they had seen what happened during a conflict, their opinion on Mexicans would probably be the same as it was regarding the Italians during the last war... which is basically: throw them all in the trenches.

Regarding the broader topic of multiculturalism... luckily, we live in a country where you can talk about multiculturalism, or even brag about it if you want...but you don't actually have to live it! Anyone who has spent any real time in Western Europe knows exactly what I'm talking about.

blueranger2 said:Given how much ground those Northern League separatists have been gaining lately, do you guys think a breakup of the Italian Republic is actually on the cards in the next 50 years or so? I saw a report where even a Berlusconi-esque figure's wife claimed that Italy was never truly a unified nation to begin with—which is a bit of a stretch, if you ask me—and suggested it hasn't quite matured enough to stay that way.👎

Honestly? I wouldn’t mind seeing Italy break into a hundred little pieces if it happened.😂

Though... it’s probably a long shot. Like someone once said, there just isn't enough "critical mass" to make it happen.

Joseph Watson3 said:What are we even talking about here? What does a city's budget have to do with its actual economic muscle? Sure, wealthier cities tend to have bigger budgets, but that’s hardly a rule—and it certainly isn't a metric for economic strength. If you want the real measure, look at total GDP. By that standard, Moscow sits at 25th place, with a GDP roughly 15 times smaller than Tokyo's. And that's using PPP—if we're looking at real GDP, the gap is probably even wider!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_GDP

So, there you have it—just a little food for thought regarding the idea of Moscow becoming the world's leading economic powerhouse. 😂

Looking at this list, New York City supposedly has three times the GDP per capita of Moscow, which is obviously nonsense... basically, the data is junk.

If we assumed Moscow had the same GDP as New York City based on these numbers, it would jump straight to 4th place.

gentleranger10 said:It's all incredibly relative. Remember that whole argument where people from the South tried to claim their city was richer than ours just because their local county budget hit half a billion dollars? Give me a break. That massive budget covers stuff our federal government handles, like healthcare and social services. It’s about how the money is structured, not just the raw numbers. Or does someone here seriously think Moscow can be put in the same bucket as New York City or Tokyo? 🤣

I agree that what "budget" actually means matters, since the term can be pretty misleading. But my point was simply that your math is off.

Regarding the Tokyo-New York-Moscow comparison... I’m not saying Moscow is wealthier than those cities, but saying they're closing the gap fast is just a fact.
Like I said... Moscow is already one of the cities with the highest billionaire counts in the world. To anyone claiming that doesn't matter, I'd just say you thought those numbers were irrelevant back when New York and London were flexing their wealth—not to mention all the other ways they've flexed in the past, like dominating the Forbes lists.

gentleranger10 said:Exactly! That’s my whole point. This "richest city on earth" isn't even three times wealthier than Chicago. 🙄🤣

Plus, let's be real: Moscow doesn't quite hit 12 million, and Chicago hasn't even reached a full million, so the gap is actually even smaller than it looks on paper.

I think your math is a little off here..😁
How are you measuring wealth? Are we talking absolute numbers or per capita???
If you're looking at it relatively, then Moscow, Tokyo, or New York City aren't the richest places on earth... it's probably some tiny village in Switzerland.
But if we're just comparing the cities mentioned in this thread, Moscow seems to come out on top when you look at budget per resident.
Now, if you're going by absolute totals... then the original poster is right to say Moscow will soon be the economic powerhouse of the world... I mean, it already has the highest concentration of global billionaires.

As for those rough budget numbers.... I just threw them together to get a sense of the scale. Go ahead and run the exact numbers yourself... I doubt your results will look much different from mine.

gentleranger10 said:You flaunt that kind of massive wealth while other places are starving out there.🤣 Even a mid-sized US city like Columbus, with barely a million people, is pulling in over 1.5 billion USD.

It’s funny how you, the resident math whiz, managed to miss the obvious calculation here.

Moscow has roughly 12 million people and 44 billion dollars, which is about $3,660 per person.
San Francisco, for example, has a million people and 1.5 billion dollars, making it $1,500 per person.

Matthew Nelson48 said:We could always just switch to the Milankovitch calendar since it's way more precise than the Gregorian one anyway.

Sure, you could, but from what I gather, that calendar is only marginally more accurate than the Gregorian system. We're talking about a difference of just one day every 2,800 years.
It’s actually pretty interesting that certain American churches have accepted his calculations without actually putting them into practice. It’s a bit of a missed opportunity; if they had, almost every Christian in the world today—aside from a few niche sects with their own specific schedules—would be celebrating the exact same holidays on the exact same day.

Anthony James2 said:Based on which calendar? 😎 😎 😎

Regarding this whole 'ecumenical calendar' thing... you really have to go with the Gregorian one. And I’m not just saying that because I’m biased toward my own side or whatever; it’s simply because the Julian calendar is flawed. It loses a day every hundred years or so.
Basically... if Orthodox churches stick with the Julian calendar, Christmas is eventually going to end up landing in the middle of summer!!

Besides, what kind of calendar even claims today is April 16, 2008?🤷