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Comment by autokad | Hacker News Reader

I can't believe they thought it was that high. I mean general unemployment is no where near 27% and you'd suspect that with threat of losing visa status, immigrants are more likelier to take a job they dont exactly grok.

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The question is a bit ambiguous though. I could see people thinking "I'm sure a quarter of them have been on it at some point" rather than hearing the question as "what percentage of immigrants are on unemployment at the present time?"

The "umemployment" part of the question can also be heard incorrectly. Unemployment properly refers to a specific benefit paid out after loss of a job. But I'd bet many respondents mentally generalized from that to many other types of public assistance and welfare.

"grok" is defined as "comprehend the dynamics of" which I'm not sure you meant.

That is a rather impoverished explanation of a complicated word. A closer description would be "to understand something on such a deep and personal level that the lines of identity between it and you blur."

Here's a passage from the book that coined the term (as a word from an alien language)

> Grok means "to understand," of course, but Dr. Mahmoud, who might be termed the leading Terran expert on Martians, explains that it also means, "to drink" and "a hundred other English words, words which we think of as antithetical concepts. 'Grok' means all of these. It means 'fear,' it means 'love,' it means 'hate'—proper hate, for by the Martian 'map' you cannot hate anything unless you grok it, understand it so thoroughly that you merge with it and it merges with you—then you can hate it. By hating yourself. But this implies that you love it, too, and cherish it and would not have it otherwise. Then you can hate—and (I think) Martian hate is an emotion so black that the nearest human equivalent could only be called mild distaste.

The complexities of the word have been lost as the English language continues to evolve, until the colloquial understanding supplants the literal origins.

We exist at a particular moment in time, and language is a tool that is used to be understood. If one wishes to use arcane and literal etymologically-derived definitions of words, it is necessary to say so.

Woah, I always thought it came from the unix utility's name - but never thought to wonder why the utility was named the way it was!

good point, I didn't use it correctly

When arguing about immigrants and unemployment I always wondered why people get so upset over it. If the immigrant is even able to collect unemployment that means they paid for it.

So they're literally just getting the money back that they paid into it. Probably considerably less, even!

So why should anyone care that they're collecting a benefit that they paid for? I don't get it.

Do people get upset over legal immigrants? (Such as through marriage or relative) As far as I am aware it’s mainly about illegal immigration. However, if you are on a work visa, I believe the law states the visa is revoked if you lose your job with the employer.

Unfortunately all media is biased, with most primarily taking a far left stance. This is likely just due to $$$ as we live in a capitalist society. If I owned a news station the questions I would ask is “what demographic is the most profitable to us?” and “what content brings in the most money?”

You are gravely mistaken if you think news stations slant "far left".

Are you referring to local news stations or national networks? I've also suspected CNN and MSNBC have a bias toward the "far left". What would you, caseyohara, accept as proof of left-leaning bias from CNN or MSNBC?

There is a significant difference between being left-leaning, and being far-left.

You are right on this point. However, everything is so politicized that you aren’t allowed to be leaning in any direction. You are force to choose..which is ridiculous. To give an example, why is it unacceptable to many on HN to like policies from both Obama and Trump? Having been on here for a while, you will get applauded for 1 and spit at for the other.

Typically, a source with a bias towards the "far left" might be inclined to agitate for Marxist revolution or anarcho-syndicalism and consider European social democrats to be right wing sellouts because they haven't shown any inclination to abolish private property or even punitively tax the rich. Do you have any evidence of this bias in their news coverage?

Just to clarify, I was referring to nationwide/major stations. I don’t have any comment on local. I would imagine the bias (or non) would be based upon that social demographic area ( southern Calif is more left compared to South Dakota which is more right)

Unemployment doesn't work like that. As long as you've paid something in, you can get paid out the same as anyone else. So you could have a situation where non-immigrants are paying into the system more than they get out, while immigrants are getting paid more than they paid in.

I would invite you to look at Shadow Stats for a real peek at unemployment numbers, not the “cooked” numbers from the BLS.

http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-chart...

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