There was also the "white Australia policy" though. And China is the perfect scapegoat, like NK, since they seldom make public statements, and when they do, the west tend to treat it as across the board false.
But the top Area Studies scholars are not working for the government. I hang out in quite a few Chinese telegram chats (mostly sysadmins and just bullshitting - the term translates well literally but carries a slightly different connotation in that it's not falsity per se but bragging/exaggeration OR falsity, depending on context). There's a pretty general sense of neo-imperialistic motives on the part of the west and it's hard to blame them considering that for a nation that wasn't annexed it effectively had very little to no say in the administration of various parts of its territories for 160 years. Whether out of arrogance or because there's a huge blind spot (or both), this has led to missing out on numerous opportunities in effectively gain leverage on the CCP in significant ways, like getting rid of the quota system for H1-B visas so those who were on F-1s and graduate can actually stay and work in the US, or give general asylum to the protestors against the Chinese takeover of HK, a cohort that is educated, have relevant skills, speaks English, and compared to the rest of China, are relatively wealthy. The official fear of a brain drain have been around since the 1880s - the Chinese Exclusion Act was the preferred policy of both the US and Chinese governments, one that helped nobody and legitimized racism parallel to Jim Crow. One would think that we'd be over that by now.
There's some chatter that there's a soft-coup since Xi haven't been leading the nightly 30 minutes of propaganda, probably for the first time since the 1980s the news, broadcast nationally, didn't lead off with some inane report of leadership meeting dignitaries. The truth is anybody's guess but an actual military coup is unlikely to occur after the Lin Biao incident. The fact that America doesn't even seem to be aware of this is telling, and in North Korea's case, even more amplified.
Also, a nation-state cannot by definite launder any money since money laundering is only a thing because the state wants its cut. But here, by their theory, all of the money is going to the nation-state so... what laundering are they talking about? Theft, perhaps. Expropriation? Sure. But laundering? That makes no sense unless you internalize that America or whoever is actually the world's policeman. Good luck with maintaining credibility with that outlook.
Worked with the Stolen Generation. Trying to fix the massive gaping problems that Australia's racist policies have caused in the past. I'm the last to deny that there are racist problems.
However, the money laundering problems have primarily come from China. That's what the history shows, and why there's the focus there. The country itself isn't being blamed. The absence of protections between Australia and China, across regulatory borders, is what is being blamed.
(Yes in New York and Indiana, no in Massachusetts, and the law is silent elsewhere. Personally I believe that because the torta exists, the burrito may have some characteristics of a sandwich but should be considered a wrap)
180 and blue and I suspect that language also plays a part (I was brought up in an environment where the word turquoise starts with green, but now live in a turquoise-producing state where the finished product look far blue-r.)
You say support, I say coercion. There is no federalism in China. It's all mandated, even if the language used is ambiguous enough to be interpreted as voluntary, policy in China is never discretionary when orders come down from above.
(Technically there's no federal government, period. There's just the bureaucracy and the party. The party's leadership determines policy, the bureaucracy carries it out. Local decisionmaking exists when micromanagement reaches its limits, and ultimately it is a system of gap-filling. Or, in a sense, it's a system that the 9th and 10th Amendments of the US Constitution anticipated and therefore needed to be addressed, 200 years early)
And the IP does not belong to the American government, why are taxpayers forced to subsidize such an expensive and potentially dangerous endeavor anyway? Not to mention that IP theft hs two metaphors in it - property, and theft, as the equating of intellectual property - a statutory creation - and real property - which exists unless you don't believe in your lying eyes - is ultimately the bad faith muddling of legal fiction and reality. America would absolutely know the difference, as one of the most prolific thieves of real property in recent memory (see: why and how the state of Georgia exists in the first place, or 'manifest destiny', or 'civil asset forfeiture'). Since there is no private property in anything close to the way the west conceptualizes it in China, nor anything resembling rule of law, what even gives America the right, beyond realpolitik, to even assert not just equivocation but effective extraterritoriality considering that American courts have a presumption against extraterritoriality as part of its doctrines.
This is not to endorse the CCP in any of its actions, but it is really not the business of the American government to impose its definitions and legislations upon the world in such a cavalier fashion. The jingoistic stench is the free prize, and it creates an artificial unifying point for the CCP to rally its citizens, who all go through indoctrination in nationalism but certainly by no means all buy into it, to focus on something that, probably thanks to the lack of cultural and historical competence amongst government officials in general, reinforces the primary raison d'etre of the CCP in the first place. After all, it's effectively the last country to take Westphalian Sovereignty at face value, however insincere it might be. I would categorize American policy as neo-imperialist, but are Americans even bothered by the idea that they are the evil empire? Are we the baddies?
Forgot to answer your actual question: Delta does directly handle its ramp operations at ATL, as well as at BOS, CVG, DTW, MSP, MIA, and SEA. But in the US there are state and federal labor laws to consider and where possible, they, like the other major airlines, offload a lot of staffing generally to Unifi or similar specialist staffing agents. Unifi used to be part of Delta until spun off and sold around 2018 if I remember correctly. Beforer then they were called Delta Global Staffing and primarily handled temp hiring. Now it is 49% owned by Delta but covers hiring for United and Alaska and a few others where possible, and provides the training and certs and all that as well, temp or full time, where possible, including some ramp positions at ATL. SLC, LAX, LGA, JFK are all Delta hubs and positions for ramp agents are entirely absent on Delta's career's page, but on Unifi there are pages and pages that cover almost everywhere in North America where Delta flies. Compare Unifi's open careers page: https://unifi.avature.net/careers to Delta's: https://delta.avature.net/en_US/careers and it should be pretty obvious as to the difference.
This is a bit of generally not very useful osint info but a subdomain search on HR platforms can reveal at least to some degree the labor situation at a lot of entities. avature has over 4000 subdomains in their dns records on securitytrails alone. Not all are for staging or VPN access or SMTP. Some are no longer active, but most do resolve. That's medium potatoes at best compared to the 10k+ at bamboohr. Although if you are doing OSINT you're probably not going for a job at a lot of these staffing agencies anyway. Ever since I was asked to leave a Cutco presentation in 2011 I haven't applied for a job since and I've been poached multiple times and am basically retired at 37. But this is a neat trick and I like dataset gathering for its own sake, and it definitely gives off an interesting view of the economy that may or may not reflect how any one feels about how things are going.
(If I need a job, I prefer fangraphs or baseballprospectus anyway, but they aren't hiring anyone who filed tax returns as professional gambler, sadly)
I know that it at least differs between the US and Europe. I've known ramp agents in a few countries and in the US the contracts in the end are handled by the airlines and training/regulation is governed by the FAA. The couple of European ramp agents are ultimately contracted to the airport (or really, the entity that operates the airport). This is a small sample, but there definitely exists more than one model of how ground staff is managed that is the norm. To further complicate things, the company that pays you may be a subsidiary of the airline you work for or sometimes a different airline or group of airlines, operating under a different name.
I'll give you an illustrative example that hopefully demonstrate how convoluted things can get. Swissport is one of the largest ground services providers in the world. It was first split off from Swissair as its in-house ground service department and became an entity under the holding company SAirGroup in the mid 90s, after plans to merge several of the flag carriers of smaller European countries fell apart when Swiss citizens voted not to join the EEA and therefore, denying Swissair of access to both 5th freedom rights in the EEA and potential cabotage rights. A few years later shortly after 9/11 the airline collapsed as did the holding group which resulted in Swissport being sold off to private equity (Swiss International took over operations on the airline side, sort of, by virtue of a Swiss government bailout and the acquisition of Crossair, the regional arm of Swissair that was divested earlier, by the creditor banks, but in a ton of debt and had to recoup as much as possible. Swissport continued operating after it was sold off and maintained relationships with, well, eventually just about every major airline through mergers and acquisitions, Crossair became Swiss International and was taken over by Lufthansa in 2005. Swissport has maintained relationships with Swiss through Lufthansa but only provides full service to Swiss at ZRH and cargo service at Basel (which Swiss pulled out of in 2015 on the commercial side, and also, is actually located in France, at least airside). It also handles regional operations for Lufthansa out of Munich. ZRH is the main Swiss hub and also a Lufthansa hub, but the fact that Swissport provides full ground service there is almost happenstance since Swiss serves over 100 other destinations and Swissport over 200, many of which overlap, but they do not directly serve the airline elsewhere except cargo operations to Basel. But there is another major airport in Switzerland, and Swissport operates there, but Swiss and Lufthansa Group uses dnata as their handling agent, a subsidiary of Emirates. dnata has no presence in Basel and is a minority operator in ZRH, where Swissport handles something like 80%+ of all ground operations. If you fly Swiss to just about anywhere else in the world, you'll see Swissport, but they aren't likely, save for some prior arrangement where airlines with limited presence may agree to contract through another airline, to essentially provide service in a separate agreement, but these are more ad hoc and subject to change and affects relatively few flights in comparison.
Lufthansa had its own ground services arm that it sold off - LSG Sky Chefs. Gategroup, which owns Gate Gourmet, was the Swissair catering service until being spun off in the same mid 90s expansion that ended up in the collapse. Swissair is no longer an active brand, but it is still valuable to an extent, so it is licensed out, although I have no idea where - like how Pan Am got licensed out to a freight rail carrier, it's likely stamped somewhere random and unrelated to Switzerland or air traffic, but brings in revenue so, why not?
I rarely fly now and when I do, it's domestic US and by charter. That's a whole other crazy mess but somehow, less messy than the scheduled airline industry and far less problematic than the duopoly both having supply chain issues, as both Airbus and Boeing currently does. That's on the news, if you haven't been paying attention, and it's not going away for a bit, by the looks of it. Air travel, meanwhile, remains safer than driving.
Not exactly salvage, but more like buying in volume from government entities trying to liquidate either actual surplus or fairly new but legally required retired machines. The feds go through the GSA, state and local do their own thing for the most part. It's not unusual to see agencies attempt to sell multiple palettes of computers or just about anything you can imagine for next to nothing. Example: https://www.gsaauctions.gov/auctions/preview/288722
I personally disliked dealing with federal agencies, but entities as local as a school district can easily have a palette of relatively new machines, sans hard drive, and are far more flexible in payment and how you choose to get it to you. For a brief period I used to rent a truck and do weekly runs from Brooklyn mostly to Maryland and Virginia and Pennsylvania and get back to my one bedroom with 90-120 computers. At the palette level prices can get down to the $10-$20 each machine level (probably higher now due to inflation), hard drives aren't really that expensive either. The biggest headache was shipping but the process is likely far more streamlined today. Of course, it probably would've been even cheaper if I didn't operate out of a tiny 1 BR in Brooklyn and can actually own a vehicle and have reliable parking It's not exactly my tax dollars at work, but effectively it is a sort of subsidized sale at the taxpayer's expense, Intel isn't really selling anything for pennies on the dollar, but pretty much every municipality and county government will, at least at some point.
The irony is that before I realized it was so easy I would just open source the code - not on Github, mind you, since the likes of Akamai would DMCA pretty quickly, but playing a little bit of jurisdictional arbitrage I put it on Gitee - the Chinese copycat of Github. I don't have a background in any of this, but companies like the brag and it's not hard to put two and two together. It also was a practical way to enable me to place wagers on sports automatically - which was more or less my actual day job - and was pretty good for learning programming quickly in your late 20s.
Instead almost immediately I got inundated by sneaker botters in China and in English from somewhere that doesn't use it as a native language, judging from the idiosyncratic use. I kept the code up for a bit but took it down not because of any legal threats (good luck with DMCA-ing a platform endorsed by the CCP, even though I have no love for the party, I also find the American attitude that places intellectual property over real property in practice - from my experience as a defense attorney - to be just as screwed up in terms of priorities, just a matter of degrees. What made me take it down was the fact that I did not want to work in a customer service job or really for anyone, and judging by the requests, it was mostly consisted of "you do the work but we'll split the profits", which I can't believe anyone would fall for.
But since the internet is forever, some parts of code that specifically worked to emulate Cyberfed-Akamai from 0.8 to 2.3 are probably still floating around. My bad. I don't wear shoes normally - flip flops or nothing after having to wear a suit to work for a decade - and have no idea beyond what happens in NBA2K. Although cybersecurity firms making products that someone who learned how to program in their mid 20s and put online within 3 years and had it work should be pretty ashamed of how much they charge, considering that I haven't even taken a math course since 11th grade and had too much of an ADHD problem to watch videos or even read more than blog posts or documentation. Everything I learned, I learned by copying from Github and similar services until it worked. There must be a lot of snake oil being sold out there, maybe most of it, since the insidiousness of the whole thing is that selling bunk solutions seldom gets you in trouble anyway, while actual crime - rape, murder, robbery and the like - are largely lagging because the police simply prefer to complain about culture war bs instead of actually, you know, do their jobs. Who knew Judith Butler was THIS spot on.
Thank you very much for sharing your story. From what I know these days, sneaker bots as an industry have pretty much gone downhill. Not because of anti-bot measures, but because the entire industry has essentially shifted from retail stores to eBay resllers. Everyone is competing to buy the first batch to the point that it is not worth building a sneaker bot anymore.
Garbage in garbage out. Lawyers can't make up shit since most don't have a plan B if they're in immigration - it's not the highest paying, extremely specialized, and pretty much requires you to be multilingual. Only some of the skillset translate and much of it requires you to move to DC. Consular processing is less bout the lawyer but really entirely down to how the counselor official feels and if they slept poorly the night before you can get a sudden spike in rejections for no other reason than rejection is easier than approval. But if you really have a bad case, no amount of makeup can cover that gigantic sore in your paperwork, Thiel or no Thiel.
But the top Area Studies scholars are not working for the government. I hang out in quite a few Chinese telegram chats (mostly sysadmins and just bullshitting - the term translates well literally but carries a slightly different connotation in that it's not falsity per se but bragging/exaggeration OR falsity, depending on context). There's a pretty general sense of neo-imperialistic motives on the part of the west and it's hard to blame them considering that for a nation that wasn't annexed it effectively had very little to no say in the administration of various parts of its territories for 160 years. Whether out of arrogance or because there's a huge blind spot (or both), this has led to missing out on numerous opportunities in effectively gain leverage on the CCP in significant ways, like getting rid of the quota system for H1-B visas so those who were on F-1s and graduate can actually stay and work in the US, or give general asylum to the protestors against the Chinese takeover of HK, a cohort that is educated, have relevant skills, speaks English, and compared to the rest of China, are relatively wealthy. The official fear of a brain drain have been around since the 1880s - the Chinese Exclusion Act was the preferred policy of both the US and Chinese governments, one that helped nobody and legitimized racism parallel to Jim Crow. One would think that we'd be over that by now.
There's some chatter that there's a soft-coup since Xi haven't been leading the nightly 30 minutes of propaganda, probably for the first time since the 1980s the news, broadcast nationally, didn't lead off with some inane report of leadership meeting dignitaries. The truth is anybody's guess but an actual military coup is unlikely to occur after the Lin Biao incident. The fact that America doesn't even seem to be aware of this is telling, and in North Korea's case, even more amplified.
Also, a nation-state cannot by definite launder any money since money laundering is only a thing because the state wants its cut. But here, by their theory, all of the money is going to the nation-state so... what laundering are they talking about? Theft, perhaps. Expropriation? Sure. But laundering? That makes no sense unless you internalize that America or whoever is actually the world's policeman. Good luck with maintaining credibility with that outlook.