Or: Shouldn't immigration be good for capital?

I know they'd prefer for migrants to stay somewhere where their labor time is cheaper to make better use of unequal exchange, but how is it better to spend so many resources on turning away refugees and immigrants that are desperate to work for cheap, than to simply let them get exploited? What are the forces at play that make capitalists invest in border security so much? Is it simply to keep an implicit threat on the existing undocumented immigrant population to make them more precarious and more exploitable?

If you've been interested in PoE before and bounced off, next week is a great time to try it again! The whole game is being changed. Some more info here

Brought to you by the brilliant mind behind Love Me I'm A Liberal 2021 Edition

Disambiguation:

Belts going straight into buildings a la Satisfactory, Create in modded MC, or Mindustry. Buildings usually have slots that allow you to plug a belt into them.

Inserters/mechanical arms that take items off a belt and insert them into buildings like Factorio, or Dyson Sphere Program

My own thoughts:

Inserters and mechanical arms are generally a cleaner system since setting up assembly lines you just have belts running parallel to machines. The case for belts that directly go into/out of buildings is that it makes the math for throughout a lot simpler because there is only 1 rate in the distribution to worry about. Games where inserters have stacking, different speeds, variable throughput depending on destination, etc... have annoyed me a fair amount so I like the straightforwardness of having a belt that carries 120 items/min no matter what.

A pretty important thing to note is that 2d factory games are gonna struggle with a direct belt access mechanic since it means belts have to go through each other a lot, diagram below

[12] [12] [12]   
-/|---/|---/|  
--/----/----/

The belts in the 2nd line have to cut through the first. In 3D that's not a problem since you can just stack the lines vertically instead, but in 2D you have to use whatever mechanic the game has to go above or below existing lines. I think this is the main reason the inserter mechanic is most common, but some games like Mindustry solved this problem neatly and allow you to easily pass items in multiple directions. Dyson Sphere Program also has direct belt inputs for a few buildings where only 1 input is needed, but DSP allows belts to easily cross over each other in 3D space, it just doesn't allow stacking assemblers vertically like in other 3D games.

Another solution for 2D games with direct access belts is to allow for the building itself to act as a kind of junction. Final Factory (an underhyped new release) has this system where you run your belts like this:

[1]--[1]--[1]
[2]--[2]--[2]

And as a building fills up, it starts passing the overflow to the next one. This means as long as you feed the first building in the chain with enough items to stock the whole line, you'll be fine. Then you can take the products out the bottom or sometimes you can fit another line through the crafters to take the output from the assembly line.

Also, another thing, some games use neither system because they rely on other systems for transporting items, like units that automatically carry them. I haven't played any games like that outside of modded Minecraft with Thaumcraft golems and Pneumaticraft drones, so feel free to give your thoughts on those (I think Oddsparks works this way? Haven't tried it yet).

You accuse them of being a socialist because they support Biden. Then you run through all the thought terminating cliches:

• Human nature
• Imagine you have 2 cows
• Totalitarianism/authoritarianism
• Socialists are just utopian idealists who haven't received their first paycheck/don't know how the real world works
• Explain the origin of money using the barter myth
• Climate change related thought terminating cliches that could literally fill the character limit 3 times over
• Call them a tankie
• Say that tankies always claim real communism has never been tried because they keep moving the goalposts
• Show them the reddit front page, /r/theleftcantmeme, etc whatever you can to make the brand of lib you're portraying look as uncool as possible

Then you show them your power level. Make them feel as frustrated as we feel when we speak with their cracker treatbrains. At the very least, from then on if you talk with that person ever again they'll have to think twice before they say some stupid thing you could easily dismiss as sounding like the character you cooked up.

Also, I guess this is just the standard-issue wrecker strategy that some trolls use against us here, ended up recreating that unintentionally