Things that make you go hmmmm

there is a process for legal immigration that they can follow. Theres a few wealthy stable countries in the ME they could go to for starters/

Crossing through numerous safe countries in order to get to Europe doesn;t sound like the sort of thing a desperate person would do now does it? More like they want to go where they can get the best perks, and who can blame them, but why should people in the west put up with a whole bunch of people turning up with their hands out?

And what will happen if everyone in the 3rd world decides they want to live in the west?

Guess globalists like Macron and Merkel are happy because it will give them a bunch of cheap labour and people who will vote for them.

Hmmmmmmmm

You're not wrong about nationalism being on the rise, but what you're proposing just isn't feasible. 

Populations are growing, travel is more affordable, communication is instant and far-reaching, you're just not going to stop it now. Trying to move in the other direction is counter-productive. The world is mixing, both racially and geographically, and it's never going to stop. 

The way we're handling both legal and illegal immigration is not great, and I don't know what the answer is, but it's not to shut up shop US/Australia style, that's just not feasible in the long term. 

If this story is exactly as you describe it, then that is pretty ridiculous. This kinda crap is really grinding my gears these days. 

I don't actually disagree with most of that - maybe we're thinking similar things but from slightly different angles.  

There's an important detail missing - the reason the two men are in Starbucks are because they are waiting for their friend to meet them there (who was coincidentally white, and arrived as they were being arrested). They wanted to use the bathroom and weren't allowed to, but that's not really the story, the story is that the store called the cops on them because they wouldn't leave as they were waiting to meet a friend. Would the store have done that if they were two white guys waiting for a friend?

It's pretty hard to follow the legal requirements when you don't have access to basics and there are shells exploding in your front yard, let alone jumping through the paperwork requirements that take years to process and complete. When you're fearing for your life you don't worry about details like that.

Coincidentally, the great majority of refugees in the Middle East actually go no further than the Middle East - the great, great majority of them are in other Muslim countries in the region including Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, etc.

Borders are just a way of rich countries from protecting their assets. By living in NZ we really did win the lottery of life.

I still dont get how you see this borderless world happening in the "real world" - which is where I live !

Yes  NZ is considered by many a "better place".....Would NZ still be this "better place" if it had 20m, 50m, 150m etc people living here?

In a borderless/stateless world how would the infrastructure, taxes, security, law & order, health, education etc etc be paid for/work etc ?

I believe allowing complete freedom of movement would cause social disruption, resentment & ultimately a breakdown of the society that was in the "better place" originally.

I accept I may not have the imagination or foresight you do, so please explain & convince me how you seeing how it would "work" in REALITY.

I have found myself agreeing with Ryan for the first time ever on a couple of comments on this thread.

Ryan where I cannot agree with you is on your comments regarding borderless states.

in fact we have more borders and more states then at any time in the last two centuries. 

That's a cold hard fact. 

In the last few years  over 65 countries have erected fences/walls on their border.

Sometimes you need to take a stand to get your point across.If they had just walked away and said nothing it is likely nothing would change.

I guess if wealth and opportunity was spread evenly throughout the world and there was no conflict people would see no need to flee their home countries.

Not sure how this would be achieved.Maybe some time in the future we may achieve this utopia?

Well, what's the alternatives? Tear down the internet?

The NZ economy is screwed unless something changes because the internet leads itself to monopoly and multinational corporations and most of those are based in the US. We've been isolated because our market is small but you can see the fear in Australian retail now that Amazon has moved in.

You have companies like spacex building a constelation of low orbit satelites to provide inexpensive global internet which will disrupt the NZ telecommunication industries.

You have electric vehicles disrupting the energy industry.

You have drones delivering things from fulfillment centers which will destroy logistics and retail.

Automation is destroying manufacturing and most industries will be severely disrupted. 

Automation and technology will completely change our economies as we know them, this will suck, but it will also be a leveler so the issues that we have around borders now, which are about locking in wealth and keeping those less fortunate out,won't be a big deal because there won't be jobs anywhere anyway.

I'm not talking about cutting out borders tomorrow, just that technology is making us more of a global society anyway and borders are getting less and less relevant. It took almost forty years from the creation of the EU to the formation of a common market. The modern form of globalisation is only 20 years old and started with the first dotcom boom, these changes take time obviously.

http://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2018/04/...

I don't quite know where that rant came from and I think everyone else on this forum also won't understand it but once again some facts.

Since the internet was developed, borders and states have increased. 

We were talking about borders and I elaborated on why they don't work. I don't know the stats on the strengthening of borders but there's always a reaction to change. The fact that walls are being built actually proves that sovereignty is being disrupted and borders are becoming less relevant.

Tim Burners Lee founded the internet in 1990, since then 20 countries have joined the Schengen area, although I don't think that's a relevant stat. The point is the degradation of sovereignty and borders are gradual.

Why should sovereignty be disrupted? 

I can't believe that you are so out of touch with daily routine. 

Don't forget that a lot of countries have  marine borders and have territorial rights.

That does it. I'm putting on Pink Floyd's "The Wall"

I think you're out of touch, the examples I gave of disruption of sovereignty were all virtual or in space. NZ may be a last bastion because of a small market and geographical isolation but borders don't mean anything near what they once did.

Do you think there will be banks if there's a global distributed currency?

We used to send letters through a domestic mail system now it mail goes through Google.

We used to use a domestic telephone network now voice calls go through Microsoft.

We used to buy things at stores now it's amazon.

Not domestic companies, not businesses which are employing kiwis, paying taxes, or abiding by our sovereign wishes. Look at how even China and Russia can't control access to services like telegram. Sovereignty is impossible when information has no border.

^ great point

Borders used to govern absolutely everything that went on within them. Now all they govern is the physical ins-and-outs of human beings. 

They've been reduced to one single element of what they previously represented. 

I had similar thoughts on your last couple of posts in the discussion. 

In hindsight some of my responses were clouded by a tribal sense of wanting to prove myself correct, which is a big problem in the world today, and something I really try and be conscious of, and avoid. 

It's really tough though!

Enjoy reading this thread from time to time, and agree with some of your points Ryan.

However a global distributed currency!! Fanciful stuff at the moment.

Banks are here to stay. Spent last 5 months in South America - life couldn't possibly function here without banks. They are everywhere. 

I'd say less than half popn have internet access/smart phones.

Perhaps fanciful, perhaps not. A lot of people are bidding big on crypto currencies and distributed ledgers. The thing about change is it's often sudden and disruptive and very hard to see coming. 

I read a quote recently which was something like we often don't see change when it's happening, we only see it when it's done.

Sure if EVERY human on the planet had a smart phone maybe! But that is years away from a reality.

Plus a North Korean using the same currency as an American or a Somali??

Cypto currencies will continue to grow fast, but their use outside first world countries will be limited.

You know Cuba has two currencies? One for locals and one for tourists. Weird

This is so true.

Before we know it self-driving cars will be the norm, it will happen quickly. 

In fact I heard the other day that some people have already created a "Save Human Driving" group.

You know something is for real when the complainers start to come out. 

The Dominion Post going 'compact'. 

Compact?

"A compact newspaper is a broadsheet-quality newspaper printed in a tabloid format (slightly taller)"

Guffaw!!

The Christchurch Press is going the same way, as I guess will all the papers in the Fairfax media group. The various national fairfax papers are all pretty much interchangeable now with them sharing the same articles and even the same editorials at times.

When they are not doing that they are merely regurgitating articles from the Washington Post and other Fairfax connected media outlets.

The Christchurch Press has even stopped covering local sport which I am sure has resulted in some people losing their jobs. Bizarrely enough there was an article in the Press the other week complaining about how local journalism was struggling and needed help.

Hello fairfax?

Hmmmmmmm.

Time for an independent paper to rise up

I used Home Brand paper once. It certainly made me rise up off the bog seat!

It's hard for NZ media to get enough scale to be profitable. There are initiatives like press patron

https://www.presspatron.com/discover.html which allows readers to donate to publications. I know the spinoff tries to do investigative journalism but has to save up to do it and does it at a loss, also you see stuff/fairfax occasionally do good stuff but I think fairfax in general is probably quite Wellingtoncentric just like the Herald is too Auckland centric. I don't really read the NZ press much as it's mostly tabloid, although I do listen to some of their podcasts - but I should make an effort to read the independent players like Spinoff and Newsroom more.

The whole first world thing is pretty redundant. You realise that Switzerland, Sweden, and Ireland are third world countries right? China is  classed as "second world" and is the largest market for crypto currencies, Estonia is also classed as second world and is in the process of launching an ICO for an official Estonian government sponsored crypto currency.

Also, smart phone penetration may be higher than you think. In a good chunk of Africa smartphone penetration is above 30% in a lot of homes they are the only powered device and are actually the brightest lights in house holds. You can also use feature phones to trade in cryptocurrencies. And it seems pretty clear that we're going to end up with free or very cheap global internet and increasingly commoditised portable computing devices.

The thing about disruptive technologies is that places like the third world is where it will take off first. People don't trust their local currencies and are looking for alternatives, they're also looking for the ability to inexpensively do microtransactions and take out microloans which the current fiat money system can't handle. The good thing about crypto currencies are you don't have to rely on banks, you can store your funds on a piece of paper, or carve a mnemonic on a piece of wood and bury it, or whatever you wan't. You don't need a smart phone to use cryptocurrencies, just the person that you're transacting with needs something, I can easily have a paper wallet and not bother with a phone at all, in fact the most secure way to store funds is offline on something like a piece of paper or a cold store.

Yes remember being in Zulu village, Natal 2002 and they all had the old brick cellphones. These are people that had never had a landline. So was great that mobile phones were opening communication lines for them - improving business etc etc

Still currently in Peru and cash is the King. For example there are what seems millions of taxis and buses in Lima. Very few people own a car  amongst the city’s  10 million residents. The un metered taxi and bus fleets are ancient. They only take cash. In fact they almost discourage transport upgrades as the bus conductors (who would all lose their jobs) go on big demonstrations. Any threat to job security here is a massive vote killer, and the politicians very much like to keep their jobs!

Then you have the apparently 2 million residents here, who don’t have a ‘job’. ie a huge informal cash only economy of folks having to sell whatever they can to live.

A move to a cashless society here remains a pipe dream.

Neo Nazi Pug update:

Interesting stuff. He's a clever guy no doubt and I like how he dealt with the Sky reporter who said "gas the jews". Context doesnt matter right so Lock him up :D

Never again they say while their soldiers shoot at civilians for fun

Try reading the Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday editions. If they get much thinner you couldn't even use it for Fish n Chips.

Well, cashless in the FIAT system is different from cashless in a completely decentralised system which is independent from governments. In a lot of the world you see people dealing in USD rather than the local currency, you see dodgy money exchangers hanging around the banks and ATMs so people will pull out their life savings and then exchange it at a horrible rate for USD (and probably Euros now days) even though that's prohibited simply because nobody trusts the local tender, usually because of hyper inflation.

I have been to many Asian countries in the last few years and in  all of them - cash is king.

So have I, because something is one way now doesn't mean it will always be like that. What's the saying: "the only thing that's constant is change."

I don't think it was a good movie - overlapping the scenes of actual raid with an Israeli dance performance was particularly annoying - but at least they tried to tell the story from both sides (Israeli v Palestinian).

I had to watch it in Spanish, so probably missed a few insights. I had no idea Benjamin Netanyahu's brother (Yonatan) lead the raid and was killed. To this day he is still a bit of a national hero in Israel. Can't help your political career when you brother is a hero to much of the nation.

Diversity Macht Frei!

https://www.stuff.co.nz/sport/rugby/all-blacks/103471273/new-all-blacks-jersey-will-reveal-rainbow-flag