Anduril, a startup from Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, now valued at $1B • Hacker News Board

Re: Anduril, a startup from Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, now valued at $1B

#351

Post by repolfx » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 8:25 PM UTC

caconym_ wrote: post #337

repolfx wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're talking about is basically a surveillance based internal border. It can work that way for people if you have massive levels of internal surveillance (otherwise how do you think the government can catch employers of illegals with any efficiency), but it doesn't do much for goods or people who cross the border without wanting to get a job, like gang members, dealers etc.

> What you're talking about is basically a surveillance based internal border. It can work that way for people if you have massive levels of internal surveillance (otherwise how do you think the government can catch employers of illegals with any efficiency) What you're talking about is called law enforcement and it has existed in this country for a long time. Until you clarify your point (what are "massive levels of…

The current setup of law enforcement doesn't scale to millions of lawbreakers who aren't being reported by any victims of crime.

Are they just coming up here because they feel like it, or are they responding to some kind of demand?

That's incoherent. They're moving because they can earn more money in America. The fact that there are people who 'demand' lower wage workers is irrelevant: there will always be market demand to get more for less. The issues with immigration aren't on the employer's side.

Re: Anduril, a startup from Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, now valued at $1B

#352

Post by ndarwincorn » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 8:37 PM UTC

barry-cotter wrote: post #265

ndarwincorn wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Borders are an authoritarian tool of control, so allusions to empire and talking about a democratic society with a safety net being unable to handle open borders is bizarre to say the least. The entire point of the argument is that in aggregate the benefits outweigh the costs, not that it's costless.

> The entire point of the argument is that in aggregate the benefits outweigh the costs, not that it's costless. True, if you don’t have the concept of community. If you do you value fellow members differently than non-members. From a net human welfare perspective the conquest and settlement of the Americas was pretty great. More people, richer people, healthier people, more educated people. Not so great for the peop…

> If you do you value fellow members differently than non-members.

This is where xenophobia comes from, nevermind the fact that however slice it (unless counting military action/colnialism as immigration, like you do) 'community members' are more likely to commit acts of violence on other community members than non-members.

> From a net human welfare perspective the conquest and settlement of the Americas was pretty great. More people, richer people, healthier people, more educated people. Not so great for the people and peoples who were there before 1492 though.

This is a rich example to use given what you're arguing for. Colonizers weren't immigrants, they were colonizers. Blaming the original inhabitants' border control (in a world where borders were very different than the ones we have today) for colonialism, and conflating modern-day migration with colonization, is disgusting.

Re: Anduril, a startup from Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, now valued at $1B

#353

Post by caconym_ » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 11:26 PM UTC

repolfx wrote: post #351

caconym_ wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What you're talking about is basically a surveillance based internal border. It can work that way for people if you have massive levels of internal surveillance (otherwise how do you think the government can catch employers of illegals with any efficiency) What you're talking about is called law enforcement and it has existed in this country for a long time. Until you clarify your point (what are "massive levels of…

The current setup of law enforcement doesn't scale to millions of lawbreakers who aren't being reported by any victims of crime. Are they just coming up here because they feel like it, or are they responding to some kind of demand? That's incoherent. They're moving because they can earn more money in America. The fact that there are people who 'demand' lower wage workers is irrelevant: there will always be market dem…

> The current setup of law enforcement doesn't scale to millions of lawbreakers who aren't being reported by any victims of crime.

It scales to far more than the handful we go after now (seriously, it's a handful, look it up) and guess what: business owners don't want to lose what they have, and they don't want to go to prison.

It's called a "deterrent", and it's the reason e.g. bars and restaurants don't sell liquor to kids despite the fact that the overwhelmingly vast majority of kid-looking people who would try to buy it if these laws weren't enforced are not actually undercover cops. (it's a bit of a chicken and egg thing, but I'm sure you understand)

> That's incoherent. They're moving because they can earn more money in America. The fact that there are people who 'demand' lower wage workers is irrelevant: there will always be market demand to get more for less. The issues with immigration aren't on the employer's side.

I think you're confused. Are you talking about undocumented workers, or "gang members and dealers"? I addressed the former in the comment you originally replied to; the bit of my last comment that you quoted refers to the latter, and my question stands. Why (do you think) "gang members and dealers" are coming to America?

Re: Anduril, a startup from Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, now valued at $1B

#354

Post by shkkmo » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 11:36 PM UTC

lliamander wrote: post #182

shkkmo wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, clearly they are in the minority but I was responding to a claim that indicates they are negligible it non-existent. I would argue that many people oppose open borders in practice but not in theory. There are good practical reasons why open borders are a bad fit for many situations. That does not mean that those situations can't be changed to make that no longer true.

> Oh, clearly they are in the minority but I was responding to a claim that indicates they are negligible it non-existent. That's fair. I didn't necessarily read it that way, but I think we're more or less on the same page. > I would argue that many people oppose open borders in practice but not in theory. I'm not sure that we will see a practical set of circumstances where people would actually be OK with open borde…

> On top of that, most developed countries have an established welfare state. Any sort of communal system needs a way to ensure that the contributions to the pooled resources is greater than the demand on those resources. If you don't have immigration control then you get a "tragedy of the commons".

This one of the practical reasons I alluded to and is part of my reasons for opposing certain types of welfare systems (and thus something I wish more attention was paid to in the creation of policy proposals.)

Many services (e.g. education, infrastructure, policing and more) pay off so well in the long term that paying these costs for immigrants is in our own interest as they increase the long term value of those immigrants. (I think the US would be greatly served by doing something like what Germany does, offering free higher education to foreigners who qualify to attend their public universities.)

If other public services are actually being abused they can be limited to citizens of the US (and of countries with which the US has reciprocity agreements with.)

Immigration fears make a strong argument in favor of a citizenship dividend. I think subsidizing your workers and making them more competive vs. immigrants is far better for our country than the dehumanizing policing (not just at the borders) required to effectively enforce immigration laws.

Personally, I view this as a negative since I think immigration has been unabashedly good in the long term for our country throughout it's history. Immigration controls may offer some sort term benefits, but it seems hypocritical to ask for those benefits for ourselves (at the cost of future generations) while reaping the advantages of historical immigration.

Re: Anduril, a startup from Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, now valued at $1B

#355

Post by repolfx » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 11:50 PM UTC

caconym_ wrote: post #353

repolfx wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current setup of law enforcement doesn't scale to millions of lawbreakers who aren't being reported by any victims of crime. Are they just coming up here because they feel like it, or are they responding to some kind of demand? That's incoherent. They're moving because they can earn more money in America. The fact that there are people who 'demand' lower wage workers is irrelevant: there will always be market dem…

> The current setup of law enforcement doesn't scale to millions of lawbreakers who aren't being reported by any victims of crime. It scales to far more than the handful we go after now (seriously, it's a handful, look it up) and guess what: business owners don't want to lose what they have, and they don't want to go to prison. It's called a "deterrent", and it's the reason e.g. bars and restaurants don't sell liquor…

LE could do more today true, but if there were no borders at all how would they not be overwhelmed? They don't even have the law successfully enforced at the moment, let alone in a world where nothing stops people moving at all. And what stops illegals just being self employed?

Why (do you think) "gang members and dealers" are coming to America?

Ah sorry. I interpreted "they" as "all people crossing a border".

My point is raids on employers only catch cases where people are working for legitimate employers. If that's all you rely on, you can't try to filter out people who have alternative illegal income streams before they enter the country and become much harder to find and deal with.

I would be interested in a system whereby an internal border is so effective no external border is needed. But it's not clear to me it'd actually be better: there'd have to be constant checking of identity documents all the time, hugely ramped up law enforcement, and without a border it's unclear deportation would mean anything at all. People could just turn around and come right back in. It'd be sort of like trying to solve theft by just spending lots of money on police but not having door locks anywhere. There's a fundamental mismatch of costs.

Re: Anduril, a startup from Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, now valued at $1B

#356

Post by meowface » Sat, Sep 14, 2019, 1:00 AM UTC

jobigoud wrote: post #314

meowface wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a tragedy of the commons problem. While I think there's nothing wrong with wanting to move your family from a poorer country to the US, if in theory every person who wanted to do this did do this - from every country (Latin America or otherwise) - it'd eventually become unsustainable. At least not without a huge government program to try to manage it all, which may or may not succeed. Another issue is that cr…

> it'd eventually become unsustainable. If a sizable fraction of a country started to leave or plan on leaving, it could also force these countries to get their shit together to become more attractive and retain them. Similar to what we have now with counter-measures to brain drains.

If anything, I think they'd just be relieved that dissenters are leaving while true believers / "patriotic citizens" are staying put. Makes politics a lot easier. But I'm sure the reaction would vary a lot by country.

Re: Anduril, a startup from Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, now valued at $1B

#357

Post by tomhoward » Sat, Sep 14, 2019, 3:59 AM UTC

CapricornNoble wrote: post #345

tomhoward wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never knowingly been tested by any body heat sensor at an airport or other border crossing, and I've travelled plenty in Asia, USA, Europe, and in/out of my home country of Australia. It’s hard to imagine how much use it would be; an active fever is only one indicator of whether someone is carrying an infectious illness, so such a test will lead to many false positives and negatives. I'm fine with a sober discus…

>>>I've never knowingly been tested by any body heat sensor at an airport or other border crossing, and I've travelled plenty in Asia, USA, Europe, and in/out of my home country of Australia. I guess they are easy to miss, they just look like camcorders on tripods, usually, but the checkpoints themselves and their purpose are usually clearly marked. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2009-04-27/a-thermal-camera-syst... http…

Both those links refer to specific infection outbreaks, that health authorities feared (rightly or wrongly) may escalate into global pandemics. Both were contained due mostly to medical systems implementing standard procedures for controlling outbreaks. Checking some people at some border crossings may have helped somewhat, but it was only one part of a much broader response.

The point stands; no recent, serious infectious outbreak can be blamed on immigration - authorised or not - any more than any can be blamed on tourism.

It's just not a serious part of the discussion, and it is likely invoked as an attempt to cast certain classes of foreigners as unclean and trigger susceptible people's disgust response.

Re: Anduril, a startup from Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, now valued at $1B

#358

Post by anigbrowl » Sat, Sep 14, 2019, 7:31 AM UTC

CapricornNoble wrote: post #311

anigbrowl wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. people don't have an incentive to avoid ports of entry if we don't make the admissions process so draconian. 2. 'illegal' isn't a noun. These are people we're talking about. This is not a place for you to peddle your propaganda.

Agreed on your first point. The process absolutely needs reform. To your second. It's a truncation of the term "illegal alien": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_(law) That's not propaganda, it's a legal term. Casting commonly accepted terms of the relevant lexicon in a political light only reveals your own political bias.

Recasting legal terminology into dehumanizing nouns is a propaganda technique. It's very obvious that you're here to grind an axe and your axe is a style I'm very familiar with.

Re: Anduril, a startup from Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, now valued at $1B

#359

Post by Erlich_Bachman » Sat, Sep 14, 2019, 9:02 AM UTC

elbasti wrote: post #347

Erlich_Bachman wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that logic, doesn't someone also support "unhumane practices" if they do any kind of work or subcontract to US government? If you group everything together, then anyone supporting US is "directly responsible for an increase in human suffering". Does that really look like sound logic to you?

Of course not. I don't think there's anything in my comment that would suggest that. My comment was explicitly about: inhumane acts done to apprehended migrants and building technology to apprehend more migrants. Those seem very connected.

Does the manufacturer of cars that they provide for the border patrol contribute to the "increase of suffering"? This technology is directly related to apprehending more migrants, in fact those cars are used on the ground to do that exact thing. Some of those cars are used to separate children from families by driving them away. To clarify, my point is if you see such technology as directly related, then cars would also be directly related?

Re: Anduril, a startup from Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, now valued at $1B

#360

Post by CapricornNoble » Sat, Sep 14, 2019, 1:21 PM UTC

tomhoward wrote: post #357

CapricornNoble wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>>I've never knowingly been tested by any body heat sensor at an airport or other border crossing, and I've travelled plenty in Asia, USA, Europe, and in/out of my home country of Australia. I guess they are easy to miss, they just look like camcorders on tripods, usually, but the checkpoints themselves and their purpose are usually clearly marked. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2009-04-27/a-thermal-camera-syst... http…

Both those links refer to specific infection outbreaks, that health authorities feared (rightly or wrongly) may escalate into global pandemics. Both were contained due mostly to medical systems implementing standard procedures for controlling outbreaks. Checking some people at some border crossings may have helped somewhat, but it was only one part of a much broader response. The point stands; no recent, serious infe…

>>>Checking some people at some border crossings may have helped somewhat, but it was only one part of a much broader response.

To clarify, the body-heat scans aren't "some people at some border crossings", they are literally every human who walks through the gate at most airports, including Incheon, Taipei, Narita, BKK, and Noi Bai (Hanoi). Usually just before the immigration checkpoints.

>>>The point stands; no recent, serious infectious outbreak can be blamed on immigration - authorised or not - any more than any can be blamed on tourism.

Handbook on Migration and Security, pg 320: "The spread of the global HIV/AIDS pandemic...was facilitated by human mobility."[1]

Or look at the quarantines during the 2009 influenza pandemic[2]. Entire hotels quarantined and cruise ships diverted.

>>>likely invoked as an attempt to cast certain classes of foreigners as unclean and trigger susceptible people's disgust response.

I'm not trying to paint foreigners as "unclean". I AM a "foreigner". I'm an African-American living in Japan. I know exactly what being treated as an unclean underclass is like. I'm nevertheless able to rationally assess that the country's robust immigration controls are likely a major contributing factor to managing the assimilation rate of other cultures in order to maintain national stability.

But instead of responding with well-sourced and rational debate points you've instead lept to implications that I must just be a xenophobe who hates brown people.

[1]https://books.google.co.jp/books?id=ZP6lDgAAQBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=...

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic#Infection_co...