Bay 12 Games Forum

Unless it's an indication of a larger pattern which has been going on the entire primary season, and nobody's noticed until now. 

An explanation as plausible as the continuing population explosion the lesser floridian invisible pink unicorn is experiencing :V

_{there aren't any unicorns down here, but there is quite a lot of meth}

You'd think the skaven would be the first that could just bumble into both. Iirc they screwed with pretty much everyone and infested everything, and it was far more core to what they were than it was for the orks or somethin'.

Though... yeah, what mech was mentioning sounds like it'd probably be entirely too appropriate. Them not directly holding too many provinces would be fairly on point, really, you'd think. Or basically occupying provinces in tandem; forget taking over the surface, you'll build your own buildings, with blackjack and rat hookers. No option to occupy the surface, just loot, raze, and infest the underground.

E: Maybe even have certain construction options linked to having an undercity in the same province as a particular race. So if you wanted those giant slave rat people things, ferex, you'd have to build their building in an ostensibly human controlled province... stuff like that. Probably one building path for each of the distinct races (human, undead, orc, dwarf... maybe something special for high chaos corruption provinces, too) or somethin'. Really give a strong reason to infiltrate everything, and possibly manipulate things so one of the regions you've got a foothold in has access to all options (i.e. the above ground is a morass of multifront war :V).

tl;dr, the next person you encounter that says we should be spending less on immigration services, you can assume is some combination of ignorant, malicious, or incredibly stupid.

Turns out we're apparently spending less than fucking nothing! Another point of info explaining how our immigrants (documented or not) are managing to be a net economic gain.

Though the question relative to the discussion, I guess, is if we're managing to make more money off them than qatar does through their effective slaving efforts :V

I think one of the most fun things about that list of questions is that number 4 (have you aided in any way an organization, etc.) is one that anyone that has ever paid taxes in the US would have to answer yes to :V

That ever in there is a helluva' thing when your country has any military history whatsoever...

They were very big bears, m. The SUVs unfortunately didn't work. Seriously options were explored and then the options were eaten by bears. Turned out the sticks were the best way to survive. Less noise, less visible, etc. The bears don't eat you if they can't see you... usually, anyway.

God, why wouldn't you just invent gunpowder and airplanes?

Too busy being eaten by giant bears, mostly. You have to admit it's fairly difficult to bootstrap millennia of technological progress while you're being eaten by a giant bear.

Frumple, that 3.2b self-funding does not surprise me. As I said, $20,000 for the paperwork through USCIS alone. We get to spend another $2500 in a few years just to get citizenship.

Hey, hey. 3.168b of self funding. 1% came from the fed. And I'm sure at least some millions came from passport fees and whatnot!

And by sure, I mean I just checked, and found out the USCIS doesn't handle passports at all. Welp.

But yeah, hadn't really looked at it much. Today I learned we have instantiated what appears to multi-billion dollar industry substantially dedicated using those multiple billions to make more multiple billions from people trying to immigrate (with a side order of actually helping them immigrate), apparently because our government/people cannot be arsed to give much of a fuck's worth of support for 'em.

What the fuck, country my country?

On the other hand, I guess there has to be some kind of twisted kudos given to the USCIS? They are apparently exploiting the hell out of the people they're supposed to be helping (i.e. being what can only be grotesquely inefficient and ineffective, just to maintain funding), and still managing to process quite a lot of people. It's seriously screwed straight up fucked up, but at the same time somehow somewhat impressive.

E: Definitely goes a long way towards explaining how we're apparently not beating the BAMF at the game, though. Seriously, how the hell can we let that go? We could be legitimately saying the US immigration services are more badass than the BAMF, and we're letting this opportunity slip through our gorram fingers.

I can't even begin to imagine what could fix the immigration system at this point, even with legal immigrants the US has far and away the greatest volume of immigration in the world. It'll take an entirely new conception of how to process immigrants to even have a chance.

... y'know, I had to actually check that statement, 'cause I figured... well. The states say a lot of stuff like that. And there seems to be a sorta' pattern to 'em, some days.

Turns out it's sorta' right! Also sorta' wrong. As more or less expected, s'the charity thing again, except even more exaggerated. The US does indeed have the highest raw number of immigrants.* Per capita? Per capita we're sixty something spots down, going by the 2015 numbers listed here (we do a bit better by the '05 data, being only 40-ish down). There's over sixty countries in the world with higher immigrant to non-immigrant population ratios. Sixteen if you only include those with an immigrant population over a million. Still second (germany beats us by ~.5% by 2015 numbers -- goddamnit germany, it's the charity thing again, you bastards) if you include those with an immigrant population over ten million.

Of perhaps particular interest is that we're apparently one of the very few countries (one of only six, of those included in those linked numbers) that has a larger portion of the world's immigrant population than we do immigrants compared to our own -- most countries seem to have more of their population be immigrants than their total immigrant population is compared to the world immigrant population, than the US does. Considering it's before six AM right now and I'm barely awake, I'm not entirely sure what it means, but it definitely stands out.

... really, it looks a lot like our "entirely new conception of how to process immigrants" roughly boils down to "throw at least as big a chunk of our country at it as several dozen other countries seem to manage." Again. Maybe a side order of be as efficient about the process as who knows how many other places. Again.

Noooot going to lie, as noted above I kinda' expected something like that when I went looking. Our country seems to like making statements along those lines, using the sheer weight of being the third most populous single country and having a fuckhuge economy to conceal relative underperformance...

Though hey, I guess we are doing better than china or india, the two countries with an even larger population! I, uh. I'unno 'bout y'all, but the words damning with faint praise come to mind >_>

*The rate was a bit more of a bitch to find... seems like everyone prefers to keep the numbers as a net migration rate than provide it separated in any format that's easily accessible and trivially findable. Still, on that metric, our own cia numbers put us at rank 34 (since their website apparently doesn't allow for direct links to the data, look under people and society, net migration). 33 other countries that have more people coming in than leaving, per capita, than we do. Canada's got us beat. Also on all the other per capita metrics I checked regarding the stuff above. Damnit canada, hats aren't supposed to be smug!

E: It's just... is it really so much to bloody ask that for once, when you go and check the data it actually agrees we're unequivocally kicking ass? Gets annoying to keep seeing us say we're the best at X and then it turns out fifty other goddamn countries or some shite like that are actually better at X per person. I don't just want to outweigh these blighters, I wanna' outlift 'em, too!