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Svalbard is as close as you can get to a place with open borders

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Re: Svalbard is as close as you can get to a place with open borders

#131

Post by diminoten »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #45
snowwrestler wrote: post #35

I think the degree to which open borders are a reality within the U.S. is under-appreciated. As a reminder, U.S. states are sovereign entities with their own criminal laws, tax regimes, educational systems, property and contract rights, civil rights, economic growth, industries, natural resources, etc. In some cases their laws are pre-empted by U.S. federal law, but there remains quite a bit of diversity. Despite thi…

West Virginia is being emptied, however, with a net loss of population over time. People do leave bad economic areas for good ones over time. People don’t move to Washington from Oregon because their jobs are in Oregon and they would be subject to income taxes anyways. Really not smart if you work in Vancouver WA to live in Portland, however (income taxes are an or proposition). However, I totally agree. Contrast thi…

But like, what's a Washingtonian going to say, "These Oregonians are stealing our jobs!"? No way!

So confusing...

Re: Svalbard is as close as you can get to a place with open borders

#132

Post by elliekelly »

DataGata wrote: post #60
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

West Virginia is being emptied, however, with a net loss of population over time. People do leave bad economic areas for good ones over time. People don’t move to Washington from Oregon because their jobs are in Oregon and they would be subject to income taxes anyways. Really not smart if you work in Vancouver WA to live in Portland, however (income taxes are an or proposition). However, I totally agree. Contrast thi…

The hukou system is fascinating- I literally turned to a Chinese coworker to ask about it. He is dealing with visa issues in the US, and explained if he wanted to go live in the Chinese city of his family, he'd have essentially a new set of "visa" issues there!

Never having heard of the hukou system before (wikipedia[1] for anyone in the same boat) I have a hard time understanding the rationale behind it. The only "benefit" I can see is the government having more control over citizen movement and reduced class mobility. I was surprised that people with rural hukou status who had migrated to urban areas were reluctant to change status. I'm curious how it's perceived by the people?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hukou_system

Re: Svalbard is as close as you can get to a place with open borders

#133

Post by rayiner »

bobthepanda wrote: post #116
dragonwriter wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > New York (second poorest in the US) > On what basis? Probably the same basis by which California is the poorest: statewide cost-of-living adjusted poverty line. There's a number of ways this measure is potebtially misleading; for instance, both New York and California are diverse states where the local cost of living varies considerably, and the numbers for any CoL adjusted measure would look very different if in…

Yeah, when it comes to New York, CoL, income, etc. vary widely; Albany, Buffalo, Binghamton, and NYC are all incredibly different. And as far as I know county level CoL isn't so great either, depending on how big your county is; even in New York, Huntington and Riverhead have vastly different local economies (to the point where there are occasionally calls to split Suffolk County in two), to say nothing of massive co…

That’s true in Virginia too. But in the flip side, most people live in the expensive metro areas.

The chart I posted uses the BEA’s regional price parity figures: https://www.bea.gov/sites/default/files/methodologies/RPP201...

Re: Svalbard is as close as you can get to a place with open borders

#134

Post by ArnoVW »

gambiting wrote: post #117
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was used as an argument for Brexit in our referendum. I'm not sure that was the real reason for the agitators though.

Which was dumb then and still is - UK was never part of the Schengen agreement and has full control of its borders, it can stop anyone from entering as it pleases.

Schengen is about being able to check at your borders. Indeed the UK can still do that, despite being in Europe.

However, the UK still has to allow free movement of people. Meaning that it can not stop Europeans from living in the UK. This does not cover working though, and I believe that some European nationalities still have to apply for a work permit.

See http://www.europarl.europa.eu/factsheets/en/sheet/147/free-m...

Re: Svalbard is as close as you can get to a place with open borders

#135

Post by davvolun »

monksy wrote: post #98
snowwrestler wrote: post #35

I think the degree to which open borders are a reality within the U.S. is under-appreciated. As a reminder, U.S. states are sovereign entities with their own criminal laws, tax regimes, educational systems, property and contract rights, civil rights, economic growth, industries, natural resources, etc. In some cases their laws are pre-empted by U.S. federal law, but there remains quite a bit of diversity. Despite thi…

The United States has "open borders" arround the states, because it is the _United_ States. For th emost part, most of the EU has "open borders" arround their member countries. (Sometime that flexes since it's not united) As far as the diversity in culture, I would not agree with that amongst states. Not in a way of comparing say Costa Rica to Panama or the UK to France.

Having just finished re-watching Ken Burns' Civil War for the first time in 20 years or so, like a freshman psychology student who now understands the motivations of the entire world, there is a line in the documentary, stated I believe by Shelby Foote, that stuck with me

> Before the war, it was said, "The United States are." Grammatically, it was spoken that way and thought of as a collection of independent states. After the war, it was always "the United States is," as we say today without being self-conscious. That sums up what the war accomplished. It made us an "is." *

I certainly, today, think of the U.S. as a whole, not as a collection of independent states, and consider the issue of states' rights to be a generally pointless debate.

* Ignore the issues for a moment with the documentary itself and with Shelby Foote, who has stated Nathan Bedford Forrest is "one of the most attractive men who ever walked through the pages of history" -- seriously, I don't even know what to do with that. And I don't know if they did their footwork -- a textual analysis of, say, newspapers prior and subsequent to the Civil War saying "the United States are" compared to "the United States is." From what I've seen regarding issues with the documentary, I would question it, but I don't know for certain. Some things they seem to have done good scholarly work on; others, not as much.

Re: Svalbard is as close as you can get to a place with open borders

#136

Post by hanche »

felixfurtak wrote: post #100
Rebelgecko wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 3 months of darkness is kind of a bummer

It does have really fast internet though. There is a dedicated submarine fiber cable servicing a population of only a couple of thousand people. https://submarine-cable-map-2018.telegeography.com/

There is a good reason for that: It is an ideal location for downlinking data from satellites in polar orbit. https://www.regjeringen.no/en/dokumenter/meld.-st.-32-201520...

(Edit: But the article points that out.)

Re: Svalbard is as close as you can get to a place with open borders

#137

Post by seanmcdirmid »

diminoten wrote: post #131
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

West Virginia is being emptied, however, with a net loss of population over time. People do leave bad economic areas for good ones over time. People don’t move to Washington from Oregon because their jobs are in Oregon and they would be subject to income taxes anyways. Really not smart if you work in Vancouver WA to live in Portland, however (income taxes are an or proposition). However, I totally agree. Contrast thi…

But like, what's a Washingtonian going to say, "These Oregonians are stealing our jobs!"? No way! So confusing...

We are too busy complaining about Californians stealing our jobs and houses to think much about Oregonians (and I was born in Portland so...).

Re: Svalbard is as close as you can get to a place with open borders

#138

Post by Someone »

nostrademons wrote: post #15

Antarctica too: if you can get there, you can step onto the ice. There's a pattern here: the only places with open borders are places where you wouldn't really want to live anyway, while the places with the strictest border controls are often those that are quite desirable.

”where you wouldn't really want to live anyway”

When reading the article, I wondered whether global warming might change that. It won’t (fully) flood (highest mountains are over 1 km high), and has ”has an Arctic climate, although with significantly higher temperatures than other places at the same latitude.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spitsbergen)

It probably will stay on the ‘too cold for most’ side, though, and the long winter night won’t go away.

Re: Svalbard is as close as you can get to a place with open borders

#139

Post by cco »

dheera wrote: post #61
nostrademons wrote: post #15

Antarctica too: if you can get there, you can step onto the ice. There's a pattern here: the only places with open borders are places where you wouldn't really want to live anyway, while the places with the strictest border controls are often those that are quite desirable.

Svalbard is an amazing, humbling place in terms of nature. The fact that once you leave town, for hundreds of kilometers in any direction there are zero humans, zero cellular reception, just nothing but you, the ice, and maybe the bears. I went there one winter and spent a week without sunlight. It was the first time in my life I went a few days without seeing the sun. A few photos: https://www.facebook.com/dheera/me…

>...for hundreds of kilometers in any direction there are zero humans...

I think you've argued directly for the previous poster's point no?

Re: Svalbard is as close as you can get to a place with open borders

#140

Post by netsharc »

"Amid scaremongering about unrestricted migration, I went to Svalbard because I wanted to see whether there were lessons we could learn from this 2,300-person community a few hundred miles south of the North Pole."

Translation: "I made up this bullshit and wrote this article so I can have the magazine pay for my adventure vacation".

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