eh

While I can't vouch for the data, it is pretty clear that illegal aliens can, if they choose, pay taxes.

As to your other point, if you decided to go live in Germany or Italy without going through the proper process, or having been rejected by the proper process due to a lack of relevant skills, would you have a total disrespect for the law once you got there?

Yes, illegal aliens often pay taxes, approximately half according to the article linked below. They apply for an ITN, which is something they're allowed to do, and pay taxes using it.

Source: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2Fpolicy-and...

A week without online shopping would probably save tens of thousands of small businesses for a year. Especially if that week was the one after Thanksgiving.

It won't change any minds, but it might prevent people from falling for it to begin with.

I remember when I first discovered moon landing conspiracy sites. I was fascinated and went down that rabbit hole until I stumbled onto a debunking site.

Since I was just looking into it for the first time, I had no commitment to it, and I was able to see that the debunkers has much simpler, more plausible arguments.

But if I had found the debunkers after telling people about it for a year, I might not have had the strength to admit I was wrong. So thanks, Internet debunkers. You do good work.

So what happens with the universal stuff like theft and murder? Do I just sign a contract with the local police agency that they'll avenge my death? What if the guy who kills me pays them more than I did to look the other way? Is there someone that enforces that breach of contract? Do I need a contract with them, or is it done by a non-government government?

OK, cool, I suppose. If you get us to a point where we don't need a government to not get screwed by everybody else, I'll be psyched about that. But it sounds like you agree that that isn't possible today.

No amount of bold text changes the fact that "government" is not some evil force that descended from the stars to harm us. In the case of the US, it was just a bunch of guys who got together to build a decision-making framework so we could decide as a group:

1) what happens when my freedom to do what I want butts up against your freedom to not have it done to you,

2) what services we want to provide for the community so that each individual person doesn't have to worry about those things, and

3) how we're going to pay for that.

All of the results of that are government. Not the evil "other" that a few of these comments have been making it out to be.

It really doesn't matter to me how you vote, but as long as you think of government as an uncontrollable evil, your locus of control will always be external and you'll be stuck in learned helplessness and despair. Once you understand that government is what we make it, you get to try to remake it, and as frustrating as that is, it's better than the alternative.

I agree completely?

Nature abhors a government vacuum. It might take the form of a local strong man's death squad or a constitutional monarchy, but if you don't have a government, you're about to have a government.

So pondering what would happen in the absence of government is not a productive use of time.

And I think you think it means "I".

The difference between "do as I say" and "do as we agreed" just shows that you don't consider yourself part of the community.

Government can't be an "I" in a democracy. Government in the US is "we." You and me, buddy. We get to vote and we get to convince each other we're right. And we're going to agree on things in the form of legislation, and if we don't do as we agreed, we'll end up paying fines or rotting in prison thanks to the institution we agreed to create to enforce our agreements.

Government didn't do those things. WE did. You live in a country where the people collectively wanted those things to happen. Don't try to demonize the government for doing what we instructed it to do.

Developers don't want to spend 8 hours tracking down a double-free'd pointer, so they use garbage collection, which adds heft.

Developers need to include graphics for 83 different iOS screen sizes, by Apple fiat.

Developers don't want to write the fastest possible code that only they could ever understand, because the next guy that touches it will break it.

Developers don't want to write in super-fast C because it won't run in a browser and it's too easy to create vulnerabilities.

Developers don't have time to reinvent the wheel constantly so they pull in bloated dependencies.

Plus a thousand other reasons.

And sure, they're also morons, I suppose.

Because google isn't an organization built entirely on misleading the paranoid and angry into being more paranoid and more angry.

but there's nothing you can do with my TV that concerns me

what if it has a microphone?