There's margin (on BOM cost), and then there's profit margin (above the design cost).
Design costs are probably an order of magnitude higher in USA than in China, and can't be spread over hundreds of thousands of units. I'd bet the profit isn't that great.
How else does an LLM distinguish what is widely known, given there are no statistics collected on the general populations awareness of any given celebrities vices? Robo-apologetics in full force here.
120 years ago 40% of Americans were farmers, today that number is under 2%.
That technical progress resulted in a few companies and farm conglomerates becoming incredibly wealthy. But the benefits that we all received was we didn't have to toil in a field, and we get fresh beef on every corner.
The wealth gap growing, and the median person being better off aren't mutually exclusive.
> The wealth gap growing, and the median person being better off aren't mutually exclusive.
The wealth gap was growing since 1980. Is the median person better today when the median person cannot afford a college education or a house?
Both of those were easily afforded in the 80s.
Also remember: the average job didn't require a college education back then either. College has become a gatekeeper due to its rising costs and diminishing returns.
That's due to the post-war boom. The book Capital in the 21st Century goes over this, that the period between 1950 - 2000 was an anomaly for the US that cannot be replicated, yet people bring up this stat as if it were normal.
The average person didn't have a college education in the 1980s. Rates of educational attainment have skyrocketed. So obviously a lot more people spend a lot more money to be university-educated than did in the 1980s. Maybe people put more value on education today?
Students expect a lot more services from universities today. They expect regular formative assessments. They expect various support services. They expect warm, air conditioned buildings without draughts. They expect healthcare, mental health support, disability services, and expensive facilities for everything: projectors and screens and computers and everything.
Could that also be part of the drive of cost? The services definitely are, theyre a big driver of the increase in admin staff at universities.
The cost of education is pretty irrelevant anyway because nobody actually pays it. You get a loan. That is paid by someone else: you, later. But young men and women heading off to university don't have a moment where they have to give up the opportunity to go because they don't have the money.
Why is “affording a house” the marker of a success? I would say just the opposite. Owning a home decreases mobility and the ability to move to where the jobs are.
That being said, the home ownership rate in the US is 65% and almost anyone who wants to go to college can via loans and scholarships.
Only around 40% of people in the US have a college education. But that doesn’t mean that the other 60% are homeless and starving.
Then cultural, as we see now, there is very much an anti-intellectual anti college bias by a major user of people in the country.
Ok, 'having that much money (or credit worthiness to borrow it) regardless of what you do with it', then?
Many people don't want to be itinerant, they want a settled home to make their own and enjoy for a long time if not life. 'Forever home' is a phrase and a positive one because that is a goal people have.
And those same people who want their “forever home” and aren’t willing to move to where the jobs are unemployed and underemployed.
I want a million dollars a year income. No one owes me that. Move to where the jobs are. I moved from my hometown in south GA the week I graduated from college because there were no jobs.
You can't both tout status-quo economic figures and then point at hypothetical alternatives. If people did as you say and took those lower-paying jobs, then the average person would be less well off -- perhaps closer to the experienced reality for many.
Well the problem, and stick with me here, is that we have people everywhere. So, as a consequence of that, having broad opportunities for everyone to earn a decent living, in more than a handful of places in the entire country, is an unambiguously good thing. And like, maybe this is pink-haired commmie-scum thought of me to say, but perhaps you shouldn't need to leave your childhood home, friends, support system, and familiar places when you finish your schooling in order to earn a living? Just because it's... really bad for you, and makes for a less stable you, which on balance over millions of times for everyone else who grew up with you, makes for a less stable society?
> I want a million dollars a year income. No one owes me that.
Why is this always where this type of conversation goes? No one has spoken about any entitlement here, but frankly, while you aren't owed a million dollars a year, I'd say you're owed something. Assuming you're working full time, I'd say you're owed at least a living wage.
What exactly does society even with a strong safety net (which I support) owe anyone? Universal healthcare? Yes. A method to enable people to have safe shelter? Yes. Even public transportation to get to jobs - Yes. I’m even in favor of affordable public college education.
But everyone should be able to own a home? No.
People today are living all across the country and not be homeless and the people who live in the poorest states repeatedly vote for politicians that want to cut government services and cut the safety nets. Right now they are cheering DOGE. Why should I feel sorry for rural America? They are getting exactly what they voted for.
We are under no obligation as a country to make sure that people who want to live the rest of there life in the MiddleOfNowhere Oklahoma can stay there for the rest of their life who don’t want to move. Besides again, these people overwhelmingly voted for politicians who don’t want to help them.
They are also cheering for the dismantling of the Education department, defunding colleges, cutting Medicaid, inflationary tariff policies, etc.
Average rent in 1980 was $243/month. Average rent in 2025 is $1397/month.
For those who cannot afford a home, life has gotten worse. For those who _can_ afford a home, their life has gotten worse. It doesn't matter where you plan to pivot this discussion, its all bad numbers for your discussion point.
Okay, so what do you propose? Rent control? That is going to decrease supply. Tariffs to encourage manufacturing in America? That’s just going to make things less affordable.
But, rural America consistently votes for politicians and people who are trying to get rid of services they need the most. They are getting exactly what they are voting for and cheering right now.
They are actively opposed to programs that would make education more affordable and cheering cutting the department of education, the post office, internet for rural America etc.
first thought is to repeat whats worked in the past - have the government comfiscate all the rental land, and charge the renters 20 bucks or so to take the deed.
It’s a “bad thing” that over half of America wants (and a majority of poorer Americans) as they cheer on two billionaires that are gutting the safety net they need the most.
But that doesn't change the argument or the truth about what is, or isn't bad for people. I recognize the political disadvantage I'm at here, but lets just stick with the truth of the matter before we get into the politics.
As I said before, I'm happy if you could just agree with me that wealth gap is a problem worth tackling.
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I'm not one to tackle entire problems all at once. Lets focus on things one step at a time. Lets first agree what the problems are in America. And then once we all agree on that, then we can work on them.
I swear I have said this like ten times on this website since the election, but once again, since apparently people still don't get this:
Trump won the electoral and popular votes with 312 (58%) of the former and 77,303,568 (49.81%) of the latter, which supports saying "over half" compared to Harris' 226 (42%) of the former and 75,019,230 (48.34%) of the latter. However the population of the United States is 340.1 million of which 244.6 million are voting eligible. Some quick back-of-napkin math then will tell you that while Trump took both the popular and electoral votes enough to win, that victory represents at best the will of approximately 31% of the eligible voters. And, that's strictly the popular vote, which doesn't actually win the election. Democrats struggle in every election because of decades of meddling on the part of Republicans with regard to how electoral votes are awarded and calculated, gerrymandering in every state, anti-voter, anti-minority policies that disenfranchise people on an industrial scale from the right to vote they're entitled, etc. etc. etc.
And you can say "well the Democrats should be working harder to undo it!" and I totally agree, but between the raw numbers on the ground, the well-documented Southern Strategy that has turned formerly pro-labor and progressive swathes of America into hard right strongholds via churches, and the various culture wars that have utterly melted American's brains to a great degree spearheaded by rest-in-piss Rush Limbaugh and the rest of the reactionary media sphere he helped weld into being, it is not remotely a fair statement to say that "over half of America voted for this knowing what would happen." Some did, for sure. Not half, not even fucking close.
gerrymandering is so messed up.
but speaking strictly from an outside perspective it is a gangster move.
dare i say, gangster moves back are REQUIRED.
to whoever downvoted this, you want to take the high road? when our citizens’ voting rights have been marginalized?
or are you just turned off by the word gangster?
anyway, i propose making the gerrymandering an anti—american thing. which it is.
make it the center of everything. there should be zero other issues until the ability to vote on the issues for all our people has been corrected.
i would call out every single politician that was responsible for this gerrymandering. repeatedly, over and over again until they were harassed into a retirement recluse. that is my gangster counter move proposal.
focus on the individual politicians reponsible for this and launch an all out aggressive offensive to eradicate their whole memory from America.
> What exactly does society even with a strong safety net (which I support) owe anyone? Universal healthcare? Yes. A method to enable people to have safe shelter? Yes. Even public transportation to get to jobs - Yes. I’m even in favor of affordable public college education.
Cosigned all above.
> But everyone should be able to own a home? No.
I think insofar as property is treated as an investment vehicle, everyone should be able to own something. Like, the difference between a mortgage and a rental contract in terms of personal economics couldn't be further from one another. One creates wealth, one transfers wealth and concentrates it.
"Can you afford to buy a home" as an economic metric doesn't mean necessarily that you should buy a home and you are a poor if you haven't or simply choose not to. That's fine. However, owning a home is a significant economic data point because it's a large investment to make that requires access to okay credit, and that once done, benefits the homeowner financially decades into the future. When I got a mortgage, an insured one with no money down even, my credit immediately went down to account for having a loan, but then right afterwards jumped almost 20% in a 3 month period, even though I did nothing differently apart from paying into a mortgage instead of paying rent.
Alternatively, reform the housing market so it functions as... well, a market. A house shouldn't necessarily appreciate in value over time, and the fact that it's expected to is... strange. One could argue that if nothing has appreciably changed in your neighborhood since you bought your house, it should sell for ballpark about the same price as what you paid for it, unless you did some substantial renovations or something. And even then... if you're just making it more suited to your tastes, probably not?
In other words make houses... well, houses. Not investment vehicles.
> People today are living all across the country and not be homeless and the people who live in the poorest states repeatedly vote for politicians that want to cut government services and cut the safety nets. Right now they are cheering DOGE. Why should I feel sorry for rural America? They are getting exactly what they voted for.
Well, a lot of them are poorly educated for starters, and insanely propagandized. They've been the singular target for Republican messaging for decades now, and as you state, they've voted for those people too who have in turn damaged their schools and pillaged their industries. And that's not even going into things like offshoring and cheap international goods that have obliterated small town America, or corporations like Walmart, which have done a fantastic job of pillaging middle America's markets out of existence.
And yes it's tremendously frustrating to talk to these people since they're seemingly ready to blame anything and everyone who isn't them, their ideology, and their own choices for the fact that their home is dying, but it's still their home, and it's still dying. And like, even if their children all do what you're telling them to do, that means millions upon millions of people about to immigrate to cities from these rural areas. So like, you gotta deal with them one way or another. They're not just going to Thanos-snap out of existence.
> However, owning a home is a significant economic data point because it's a large investment to make that requires access to okay credit
You would be surprised at how low the credit rating you have to have to get an FHA mortgage. It only needs to be 580 to qualify for 3.5% down.
> However, owning a home is a significant economic data point because it's a large investment
And then later you said
> A house shouldn't necessarily appreciate in value over time, and the fact that it's expected to is... strange.
So exactly how do you keep a property from appreciating in an area that people want to be in? My parent bought their home in 1978 in South GA for $50K. According to Zillow it’s now worth $180K. Inflation adjusted it should be worth $245K (https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/).
> And that's not even going into things like offshoring and cheap international goods that have obliterated small town America, or corporations like Walmart, which have done a fantastic job of pillaging middle America's markets out of existence.
So you support Trump’s inflationary policies about tariffs that will make goods more expensive in an effort to bring jobs back to the US (which won’t happen).
The world where every other country was demolished by wars and allowing the US not to have to compete with other developed nations is gone. Manufacturing jobs aren’t coming back to the US. Would you be in favor of taxing those in the 90th percentile in wealthy (which you only have to make around $160K to be in) enough to support all of the other people so they can buy houses?
I think a lot of people here have absolutely no idea how “rich” they are compared to the average American and aren’t willing to give up enough of their income for “equality”.
> So like, you gotta deal with them one way or another. They're not just going to Thanos-snap out of existence.
Let them suffer. They would rather vote for politicians who hate the same people they hate - non Christians (except for Jews for some reason), minorities, immigrants, non-straight people, college educated, etc. They aren’t voting against their own interest because they are “uneducated”.
They see the country eventually becoming more diverse and minority/majority and are doing everything they can to fight the inevitable.
They themselves would rather not have universal healthcare because it might help the “illegals”.
Of course other cohorts are the middle class evangelicals who think they are going to burn in hell if gay people have equal rights and Jesus won’t have any place to come back to if Israel isn’t protected. I’m not exaggerating at all to make a point.
Then you have people with money who like the status quo and don’t care about inequality.
Well inability to own a house was a major prelude to the 1930s economic and later conflict issues, particularly in western Europe (where it was more expensive in places like Britain to buy a house than even today, about 10-14x salary vs 8x today). House prices have been how they are now before: in the 1920s... (America is a bit of an exception because of all the expansion into California etc in the early 1900s).
Male crime rates correlate with economic opportunity too, so even if you don't care about the 1930s and the economic reset of WW2 and its rebuilding (and WW1, but to a lesser extent), you should care about the possibility of crimes rates continuing to regress. Serious crimes don't get solved at a much higher rate than in the past, even if they have decreased since the 90s.
Home ownership is a lagging indicator and doesn't show the whole picture: If people used to buy a home at 25 and move into it, but today they wait and live in their parents house until 30 before moving into a home, the stats might appear the same. The quality of life won't be. Home ownership rate needs context too, in some countries rent is low and house prices are high(er than the US), where many people rent through retirement, and where the implication of rising house prices is not as bad unless rent also raises.
And what exactly is wrong with living with their parents longer like most other countries do and is still prevalent among first and second generation Americans?
As I asked before, what do you propose? Rent control? Affordable higher education? I agree with that. But half of America as seen by the support of DOGE and the lack of support for student loan forgiveness of any kind don’t. America is getting exactly what they voted for - especially in the poorest, least educated states that vote Republican.
> mobility and the ability to move to where the jobs are.
This is a sign of low class status and lack of success. Rich people change the world to fit their needs. Poor people change themselves to fit the world. Leaving your entire family and social network behind for work is extremely middle class behaviour
People who own a home in 2025 have to pay $350,000ish on a wage of only $66k.
Home prices have gone up dramatically more than wages.
> In which way is the average person worse?
The amount of debt needed to own a home. Which is related to income vs cost-of-home. This ignores the fact that to reach $66k+/year salaries to begin with, you needed tens-of-thousands in student loan debt as well (which the average person in 1980 didn't need).
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1. Costs of education have gone up. It costs more money to be able to get a comfortable salary to begin with in today's world.
2. Younger folk are entering a very high-priced housing market, despite being already saddled with student loan debt (and thus starting off with no savings).
3. The bulk of "starting a new life" costs are car, house, and education. While yes computers and food have gotten cheaper, I would argue that car/house/education costs are the primary gatekeeper into income and/or class mobility.
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For the 40%ish who cannot afford a house, it gets even worse. Rental prices in 1980 were $243/month. Do you want me to run the numbers on how screwed they've gotten? Or do you have the gist yet?
Also remember: 1980 was a recession year with high unemployment and incredible inflation. We're comparing ourselves to the WORST time of stagflation and some of the worst geopolitical crisis of that era.
The average student loan debt is around $40K in the US.
Even still, somehow, some way, the homeownership rate is the same, people aren’t going homeless and people’s needs are being met. How is that? If people are worse off meeting their Maslow hierarchy of needs?
So you ignore the literal prices of these things we're discussing.
Gotcha. I'm glad that I've forced you to ignore my argument rather than addressing the elephant in the room.
The average student loan debt in 1980 was zero because the vast majority of people could get by on free and public high school education btw. Especially if we assume that we're talking about the median income household.
To achieve this equivalent to 1980s lifestyle, we're talking what? $200k extra debt burdens on every average / median person? $40k in student debt and $150k++ in extra housing debt? Plus 4 years lost in education (as 1980s folk could work those 4 years instead). How is this a better or even equivalent life?
student loan debt is out of control. college is a money pit that will hopefully be dissolved within our lifetime. the social aspect is not worth the money.
all knowledge is on the internet. we do not need college at all. that will come to be more evident. but colleges got lots o’ money from donors to prolong their livelihoods.
Yeah the thing is there were better jobs that ex-farmers (or at least their children) could go to. I'm unconvinced that's the case this time round. Especially for unskilled people.
Is that really true 120 years ago? We have a lot of hindsight bias, but things really weren’t amazing for the average person in the US even one hundred years ago.
Today, the average person has affordable access to a lot of things that may have been luxuries, or simply didn’t exist, 100-200 years ago. Running water, electricity, internet, mobile phones, modern sanitation & infrastructure, and any number of tiny cheap devices that improve QoL.
And yes, we also have huge problems with wealth disparity and late stage capitalism.
The problem is, we should not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Like, we do not have widespread food scarcity problems today. Extremely advanced medical technology is available, if too expensive.
Our tech bubble is only one small part of actual technology. There is still very cool research going on in other fields. Big tech is all about personal computing & social media, and yeah, AI in this area is dubious and hard to get excited about.
At the same time, there are SO MANY other areas of technology which can have huge impacts on humanity. For example, the tech behind modern AI models has already produced breakthrough research in the field of protein folding. (https://youtu.be/P_fHJIYENdI) This will have a big impact on our ability to solve biological problems.
All that to say… let’s stop being so closed-minded about tech. Yes, the big tech social media, app, and SaaS companies are not going to give us a utopian future. But technology is way more than that. It includes robotics advances for cheap manufacturing, cheap energy from small scale hydro or even nuclear installations, advances in our ability to fight diseases and viruses (the COVID vaccine would not have been possible as quickly without modern technology), more clever & efficient construction techniques, and the list goes on and on. Tech is absolutely solving tons of real problems that we face. We can be excited for that and also not care about the next knock-off AI wrapper SaaS company.
> Is that really true 120 years ago? We have a lot of hindsight bias, but things really weren’t amazing for the average person in the US even one hundred years ago.
I didn't say they were. I said they had better jobs to go to than working in the fields. I'm not saying their lives were better than ours are now. Obviously not.
Nobody’s arguing things aren’t better in some ways than the past. But your argument amounts to what is essentially trickle down economics. The median American is getting a marginal improvement - the top .1% American has gotten an astronomical improvement.
The wealth gap increasing is a moral failure of our billionaires. They should take pride in building a better tomorrow for their fellow countrymen. And what we have now is the exact opposite of that.
It's not just a moral failure of the billionaires. Many of us live in democracies, so we are choosing (through our elected officials) that creating a few billionaires is more important than building a better tomorrow. The sorry state of things could be undone in a single election if people didn't explicitly want and vote for the sorry state of things.
We have a limited choice of who to vote for. Here in the UK that is the big parties think, and most of the smaller ones too. The same is true in many democracies.
Douglas Adams described it well:
"No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."
"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."
"I did," said Ford. "It is."
"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't people get rid of the lizards?"
"It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."
"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"
"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."
"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"
"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?"
96 years ago we there was a massive financial crisis and depression that killed a lot of people and is directly related to the (lack of) national policies of the time.
USA recovered remarkably well, but only because there was a big pivot away from crony capitalism and towards "socialism" under FDR. Big investments in The People, unions, education, infrastructure.
Causal relationships can be hard to discern. Some say that FDR's policies extended the downturn to 10 years whereas recovery from previous downturns was much quicker.
(Also, it is not clear to me how any of this is relevant to "The wealth gap growing, and the median person being better off aren't mutually exclusive".)
For example, Murray Rothbard argued in America’s Great Depression (1963) that both Herbert Hoover and FDR worsened the economic downturn through interventionist policies. He believed FDR’s price and wage controls, massive public spending, and business regulations stifled economic recovery.
My point is not that the person I was replying to is definitely wrong about FDR's policies, but rather that the effects of FDR's policies are uncertain enough that the fact that FDR imposed them in the 1930s cannot credibly used to lend strong support to any argument for any economic policy to be imposed today. The post-WWII economic boom for example happened after most of FDR's policies had been repealed.
Thanks for the reference. I generally agree that, from a very high-altitude, it's difficult to know whether New Deal policies shortened the depression given that WWII shook up the US so much. However, there are many things introduced during that time that have had a visceral effect on the average American's quality of life, saved lives, and would be terrible to abandon: the FDIC, the construction of a massive amount of infrastructure, social security, etc.
I don't think your comment adds clarity to the line of questioning and reasoning.
I think it's damaging to clear thinking by muddying the waters.
I give you an example of returning the favor to you:
"Causual relationships can be hard to discern. Some say when people spout a spurious claim without evidence nor citations that falls in line with the entrenched structural power interests it simply shuts down critical thinking and causes people to not advocate for themselves and their own self interests which lets deep systemic issues fester and rot and leading to mass violence."
Of course libertarian ideologues will argue FDR was the Big Bad. They are arguing from ideology, not science.
FDR committed the grave sin of making a lot of rich people slightly less rich, in the short term. Deregulation is the answer to everything, including the problems caused directly by lack of regulation and governance. Hilarious.
“Zoom and enhance” forensics aren’t real right? Isn’t it mostly NSA listens in and then they have to parallel construct something to hide the illegal pervasive surveillance?
Their use as evidence has been challenged by academics, judges and the
media. There are no uniform standards for point-counting methods, and
academics have argued that the error rate in matching fingerprints has
not been adequately studied and that fingerprint evidence has no secure
statistical foundation. Research has been conducted into whether experts
can objectively focus on feature information in fingerprints without
being misled by extraneous information, such as context.
There's a common belief that fingerprint analysis is objective and reliable, but there's a great deal of subjectivity involved. Additionally, there have been several convictions involving fingerprints as evidence which were eventually overturned.
While they may still be useful, they have an image of infallibility that doesn't line up with reality.
There are many instances of people being questioned, harassed, and even framed based on circumstantial evidence. Western judicial systems are specifically engineered to address these problems via the process of discovery and adversarial argument. There has never been any documented instance of a death being caused by quantum tunnelling.
Depends on the crime. They aren't exactly fungible acts. Furthermore the state isn't exactly obligated to manage society, even if this has occurred in various forms throughout history. Many of our laws weren't exactly written with "society's" best interest at heart. Ultimately, the state will look after itself above all else.
I'm just saying I'd like the state to have to work hard to put people away. The law can just as easily be wielded to harm people. I don't see much sign the american public agrees with me, and politicians certainly don't agree. Even mr "it's a witch hunt" trump is only anti-LEO when it comes to his own crimes. But I'd rather have some low background level of crime than the sinking feeling that we're imprisoning a lot of innocent people, as unpopular a sentiment it might be to some in this country.
Besides, if the government doesn't take care of society, higher crime is inevitable.
The law does not disallow Americans from accessing this service. It only disallows Apple and Google from distributing the app on their stores. This shutdown of the service is a publicity stunt.
Because my friend who just worked for years to become an American citizen after immigrating here and working for the US government still has other Americans tell him to "go back to where he came from" because he's evidently not American enough for them.
A hell of a lot of people want to "just be American" and a lot of Americans won't let them.
Some people are just angry and will direct it at whatever. Not saying it's OK, but once you really internalize the idea that people's reactions say more about themselves than about you life gets better.
That makes the bold assumption those people aren't your boss or your customers or your landlord or the policeman stopping you on the side of the road. There's real risk, both financially and physically, to just assuming that "random anger" is something you can internalize and ignore.
People who are "just angry and will direct it at whatever" can be very dangerous, as we've seen in the US even this week and in every school shooting and terrorist attack for years.
This is, terribly, the American experience. It used to be the Irish and the Italians before we decided they were "White enough." It doesn't mean we should just ignore it and accept it. If you're mad, that doesn't give you a pass to be a racist asshole to the first person less pale than a porcelain plate you see.
If anything, the fact that people have to know and cope with random Americans being this exact sort of racist asshole to them is the reason they form their own communities and see themselves as Black Americans or Asian Americans or any other sort of national or racial group.
> It’s because many of those “Americans” do not try to integrate, want to bring their culture with them...
That's okay, more varied culture enriches, and I enjoy the added richness.
>...and have a “what’s in it for me” view of [insert anything here].
That unfortunately describes a huge share of human beings on this planet.
> The label “X-American” (replace X with a foreign country) should not exist
I disagree: I think it's totally okay for people to recognize a part of their identity (key words: a part of, since a person's identity comes from many sources), rather than being forced to hide it.
> If you identify as this you are marking yourself as different from Americans.
Each individual (Americans included) is different from all the other billions of individuals on this planet (other Americans included), and that's okay. It would be weird to try to be forced to deny that totally-okay fact. Thus, a self-described Hoosier or Floridian or Cheesehead or Californian or Plumber or Texan might differentiate themselves similarly without renouncing any "American-ness". Adding one of many possible identity labels (whether race or origin or sports team or profession etc) doesn't negate all others.
> They will push for pro Indian initiatives (see H1B abuse, etc) at the expense of Americans. Ironically, this is also the cause of the discrimination they’ll face.
Ironically, this claim is itself racist: Asserting that people of a certain race are coming to get you because of their race, and thus discrimination against that race is justified, is racist (and a tired racist trope at that).
Unfortunately though, most racists I have seen are racist simply because they feel the other race is different from them, and feel that their victims are bad and/or deserve less than themselves. I've seen racists remark with nothing less than anger and disgust at baby pictures of children of other races. Babies, dude.
For another example, I'll open up and share an unfortunate case I had with a family member when we were visiting a science museum: Upon seeing how many non-white people were there, said family member made several off-color remarks to me. But these people (many of them children) weren't abusing anything, they weren't doing anything "at the expense of Americans". They were just normal people, many of them likely citizens, learning and having a good time. Them being interested in science isn't a problem, and they weren't stopping anyone else from coming to the museum. It's just that they were disproportionately represented among the sample of Americans interested in science. Good for them, science is good.
Except it doesn't. Look at the places that have the "happiest" people on earth, e.g. Denmark. They are monocultures where nearly everyone has the same traditions and history.
And in recent times they have had a lot more immigrants, and it's causing a lot of chaos.
Varied culture divides. It creates "us" and "them" groups, this is baked into our tribal psyche as humans.
I'm sorry to hear that you personally don't like the richness that other cultures add, but on the plus side, I do! :)
> Varied culture divides. It creates "us" and "them" groups, this is baked into our tribal psyche as humans
It takes someone seeking to divide, to divide. Embracing your culture and a part of your identity doesn't inherently divide anything. Ironically, the division often happens when someone says 'THEY embrace a culture I don't embrace, that must mean THEY are dividing us".
I recently went to an Ethiopian restaurant, enjoyed it, chatted with the owners, and didn't feel like they were dividing themselves from me, despite them embracing their culture. It'd be a shame for most restaurants to shut down because they embrace a culture that you don't embrace.
Have you considered the possibility that you are the one dividing people based on the components of their identity and culture and deciding which components are okay for them to have (because they match yours) and which aren't? Removing all culture but yours would be pretty boring (nothing personal, this goes for any monoculture).
That comes down to Spotify being mostly ad supported users and Apple being all paid.
If Spotify got rid of their free tier their 60-70% rev share would be more than Apple's 50%. But then the number of streams would go down by 50-60%, counterintuitively the total payout would only go down like 10-15% tho.
Spotify boasts a huge free user base, when I looked at their financials, I mathed that a paying user generating 6x as much revenue as the ad supported users. They simply can't raise their payouts and support free users.
It can't be that hard, once you develop a profile for a user, you just need to classify the incoming videos and cross reference their profile against the classifications.
