I’m genuinely not certain if you are meaning to reply to my comments because your replies don’t actually reflect what I’ve said. It is possible to have a larger discussion about a topic from a smaller example, and it’s also possible for things to not be all or nothing. I hope you can sort whatever bee is in your bonnet.

I’m not quite sure how you’ve turned “we should have the option” into “we should buy everything foreign.” I think you’re having an argument you want to have rather than addressing the point I was making.

Great, and where local is the best choice they should do that. But nobody can seriously argue that reducing the ability of government to shop around for the best cost/quality balance is a good thing. It’s not like the only options are buy everything American or everything from China. I’d like qualified experts making that decision, not legislators.

You create bad incentives if you artificially reduce competition like this. Not every good or service will have tons of American choices, so you end up with a handful of companies who know the government has no other choice.

I feel like all this is going to do is raise government costs and line the pockets of selected contractors. We aren’t always going to be the relative best producers in cost/quality balance for every product and service.

If we’re going to subsidize any industry, it should be done directly and explicitly. Otherwise, it becomes another example of “inefficient” government that should be privatized.

Marriage does not have to be religious, and it’s not exclusively religious in origin. Many millions of married yet irreligious people who had zero church involvement would take issue with that assertion.

I don’t see the point in doing this even if it was. It’s just semantics. We’d still need a legal shorthand for all the rights and responsibilities currently attached to marriage, as people would still want that. Then it’s just marriage by another name.

Also, I’m not sure any of these countries “force” any church to recognize a marriage they don’t agree with. That wouldn’t change, since I’m sure different churches would still disagree on which marriages count.

It has either gotten better or just improved its suggestions for me over time. I basically never get right wing content anymore. There’s plenty of garbage, but it’s stupid garbage rather than dangerous garbage.

Even if that were true, I fail to see how that would make it incorrect. And I don’t think it is. I’ve heard gift used that way my entire life, which I wish was only twenty years long so far. Perhaps it was regional until more recently.

About 400 years ago. Is this a really sly way of revealing you’re a vampire?

Gift has been used as a verb for the entire history of Modern English. Unless you are speaking Middle English, gift is equally correct.

True, but picking Les Bonnes Femmes for a movie night when you have no clue about the vibe is a risk. Either ask what the expectations are or go with wide appeal.

This is a notoriously difficult thing to prove out either way in data, and I’m sure it varies situationally.

The Mariel Boatlift natural experiment did not demonstrate a decrease in wages or increase in unemployment. It makes sense: immigrants both work and consume (i.e., create demand). Unless every immigrant happens to work in the same industry/union, the sum total of immigrants may create demand for labor equal to or greater than they fill.

It also may have the impact you’re suggesting. But it doesn’t have to be zero sum. And, understandably, people only remember when they lost a job potentially tied to immigrant labor. Nobody asks if the job they’re applying to was created due to demand immigrants added to the economy (and how could a company know that?).

It was a phenomenal visual device for the medium of film.