Well, I'll have to admit, I didn't have "learning that someone on Slashdot believes that the Cold War was a myth" on my bingo card for today.

I was a CWA member throughout grad school. It may be that they just put a lot more effort into the larger companies where their members were employed (think Verizon as one great example) but we didn't see much help from them as grad students. I remember one meeting my first year where we were reminded we could always ask for a union rep anytime we were talking with our PI, and that was about it.

Wow, I had no idea you were dumb enough to fall for the Red Scare.

You seem to be confusing "wanting to get rid of communists" with "wanting their countries to be poor and dangerous".

It's quite amusing that some troll follows me around modding down any comments where I suggest humans should cooperate with one another. They are literally proving my point by moving things backwards with their solitary cowardice.

That it's a competitive system is the problem. The world advances through cooperation.

You seem to have forgotten we have read your comments.

Good. Fuck off and don't come back, hypocrite.

I see that you are ignorant of the USA's entire history in Central and South America. This is my surprised face.

Hahahahaha you think nationalists care about people other than themselves hahahhahahahahhahaha

You mean unlike a congressional parasite, or a PPP parasite, or a CEO parasite?

Use preview.

No, every day now.

More people fail every day.

Unsustainable means it fails eventually, not on a specific day.

USAID was horrifically corrupt

The cuts to USAID are projected to cause 14 million extra deaths - a large minority of those children - by 2030. And USAID engendered massive goodwill among its recipients

But no, by all means kill a couple million people per year and worsen living conditions (creating more migration) in order to save $23 per person, that's clearly Very Smart(TM).

And I don't know how to inform you of this, but the year is now 2025 and the Cold War and the politics therein ended nearly four decades ago. And USAID was not created "to smuggle CIA officers" (though CIA offers used every means available to them to do their work, certainly), it was created as a counterbalance to the USSR's use of similar soft power to turn the Third World to *its* side.

They can go back at any point if they don't think the conditions and salaries offered are worth the job. What matters is that they remain free to leave, with no "catches" keeping them there (inability to get return transport, inability to communicate with the outside world, misinformation, etc etc). Again, there's a debate to have over what conditions should be mandated by regulation, but the key point is that the salary offered - like happens illegally today en masse - is lower than US standards but higher than what they can get at home.

What on Earth are you talking about? Nobody is trying to make other countries poor and dangerous. People come to the US from these countries because even jobs that are tough and underpaid by US standards are vastly better than what is available at home. Creating a formal system just eliminates the worst aspects of it: the lawlessness, the sneaking across the border in often dangerous conditions (swimming across rivers, traveling through deserts), "coyotes" smuggling people in terrible conditions, and so forth. The current US system is the dumbest way you could possibly handle it: people wanting to work, US employers wanting them, the US economy benefitting from it... but still making it illegal, chaotic, dangerous, and unregulated for those involved.