Just think -- there's people like Caucher Birkar the world over, especially in places that might not fully recognize the talent and drive. Without access to higher education, and the connections attached, talented individuals will have a very hard time realizing their full potential.
Developed countries around the world should be tripping over themselves to offer asylum, motivated not only by humanitarian concerns but by considering asylum as an investment in the brainpower of a nation.
Based on your argument though, the sensible way to do it would be to offer asylum predicated on some kind of IQ test to ensure that we’re getting all the Caucher Bitkars our there and not wasting too many resources on lesser intellects.
Indeed, what would really make sense is for developed countries to be actively working to apply IQ tests to every third-world shanty town out there, and actively paying high-scoring individuals to immigrate.
In the real world this kind of thing is generally considered somehow to be in bad taste, so most developed countries go about it in a rather more roundabout way. Still, any country which actively started recruiting would find themselves with a huge advantage (at least when it comes to Fields Medals).
There are thousands of Einsteins or Thomas Edisons that were never born because someone had a headache that evening. Should countries be tripping over themselves to encourage more babies? Is there some reason that you think an asylum seeker is more likely to be a Fields Medal Winner then a regular citizen? What about the country these people come from do you think we should strip theses countries of their brain power? Do you support regime change wars if the powers that be give you a good story about wanting "freedom" for there people while taking action that will likely kill maybe a hundred thousand people?
Say a small city has about 50 new job opening per year at there current growth rate and already has about 100 people looking for work. Do you believe, because your intentions and character are good and you mean well that somehow a magic fairy is going to come down and create more jobs just because more people show up? Do believe in type of job theory where if the wealthy are allowed to keep wages low, because of competition, that we all will be better off in the long run because of some "trickle down theory of labor"?
Those people that show up will require goods and services. The economy will act to meet that demand if it is not restrained from doing so. So yes, in broad strokes, if more people show up, more work will need doing and more jobs will be created. No magic fairy required.
If the developed countries really want to attract more talents, there is better way to specifically targeted on those individuals. Asylum is not for this purpose.
I understand that there is an HN rule against complaining about paywalls, but I think it would be helpful for everyone as a general practice, if somebody posts a paywall article, the first comment on it should be from the poster with a link to the full article text or a tool to bypass it.
I'm curious about your opposition to paywalls. With journalists losing their jobs, and quality newspapers closing, what would your ideal means of both reading these stories, and funding the production of them, look like?
You've hit on a question that is extremely interesting and quite philosophical. Fundamentally - are professional journalists a good idea or a bad idea? Note that Hacker News is basically volunteer run with a thin layer of corporate control and good moderation, so in principle we might all be happy to live without articles by formal journalists appearing on the site - making do with blogs and suchlike.
It isn't at all obvious that the large centralised news media companies are a good idea; there aren't a lot of them (the Murdoch press owns a big chunk of the public discourse). I'd be happy to see them go mainly on political grounds.
There is a suspicion that the quality of information in news media articles is higher than word of mouth; but that is balanced by the knowledge that a lot of the information is manipulative by inclusion and omission [0]. There is no question that the media edifice supports the major political parties, so the demise of traditional news media might also destabilise the strong two-party-system that exists in America (and practically in my native Australia) by reducing the ability of different political groups to coordinate. People voting on issues that affect them rather than issues that the media think is important could very easily be a net gain.
As the internet became pervasive we discovered as a society how often the news media was just making up stories, and there is a lingering suspicion that most of the important issues aren't actually being covered. I rate the top issue facing society as energy security, and it doesn't get a lot of press in that form (it is tangentially covered under environmental politics).
The clearest negative is we benefit from having a mechanism to communicate political scandals to the voters. I have a lot of faith that an alternative that is as good as a media company exists, but I dunno what it would look like.
> Do you seriously think the thing keeping you from paying for this article is lack of anonymity?
First: I wrote about "a way to do micropayments completely anonymously" which is actually two things:
1. a way to do micropayments (this is currently quite hard)
2. a way to do this anonymoysly
And yes, I find it very alarming that there is no way to pay in the internet really anonymoysly (I come from Germany, where people still love to pay with cash also because cash is hard to track) - this is really an important reason I am rather hesitant to pay in the internet.
e.g. Some poor kid in Kenya googles info that could have life changing impact...and hits a paywall that demands more than he earns in a year.
The internet became great exactly because it's the wild west where crazy things like community driven wikipedia thrive.
It's not that I oppose the whole pay for quality directly (family members are journalists)...but rather that the internet has become a bit of a core pillar of human knowledge & we really can't afford that to end in a maze of corporate walled gardens - it'll crush the thing that makes it great.
>what would your ideal means of both reading these stories,
The internet was fine before paywalls - in fact it grew & thrived. The whole you have to pay or there is no quality content seems quite false to me.
This isn’t how it works though. I was in India recently and i found that NYT or WSJ didn’t have the 10 article limit that I’m usually accustomed to seeing.
>the internet was fine before paywalls
That is because people used to pay for quality content and the internet was just a medium to get more exposure. Now since the internet has matured and there is an abundance of information available for free, people have stopped paying for quality content.
Developed countries around the world should be tripping over themselves to offer asylum, motivated not only by humanitarian concerns but by considering asylum as an investment in the brainpower of a nation.