We know exactly what caused this outbreak of xenophobic violence, it's in direct response to a dramatically brutal attempted murder by an immigrant caught on video (one who had been granted a refugee visa, on legitimate grounds or otherwise). That's hardly an argument for open borders - if anything it's an argument for stricter screening of asylum seekers.

> I'd be curious to know what this looked like at the time.

A shift in sentiment, certain kinds of comments being heard more and more, ultimately Brexit.

> even if we accept it as an example, that doesn't set the rule or show a general causation between open borders and xenophobia

At a certain point you experience enough correlations that you have to trust the evidence of your own eyes.

How is holding onto it instead of selling it for $1300 any less insane than buying it for $1300 in the first place?

> avoid changing any of the circumstances that cause the behavior

The normalisation of unsafe driving is the circumstance that causes the behaviour. Just look at how the cultural shift in how drink-driving is perceived over the last few decades has changed the rate of it happening.

The island of Ireland has had pretty low immigration (not to mention not even having open borders in the sense usually meant by "Europe has open borders", other than between a pair of neighbouring countries with very strong cultural ties), if that's where you mean by "here" you may have been insulated from it. Where I was, while it didn't spill out into rioting (mostly) there was a palpable uptick in xenophobia when Romania and Bulgaria were admitted into the EU, and another with the 2015 migrant crisis (which ultimately lead to many of those open borders being closed, temporarily or "temporarily").

> I'm from there, so I'd be interested to know what time period that would be?

Pre-1902; one could haggle over the exact date depending on what one considers an open border.

Then you haven't been paying attention.

> South Africa by contrast does not have open borders, and is currently going through another bout of violent xenophobia.

Arguably a legacy of the time when it did.

I think most of us are happy to believe that most companies simply have bad leadership, that leadership quality really is the axis on which Costco differs from others. If you want us to believe that other (destroyed) companies' leadership is just as good as Costco's, you need to make that case.

> Costco is protected by a very distinctive thing I call a "governance fortress." This fortress (and not merely their leadership) is the reason why they have been able to endure for forty years.

Can you sketch out your actual argument here (I think doing so would help rather than hinder your book sales, though of course that's a biased judgement)? What is this "governance fortress", and why should we believe that that, rather than the personal qualities of this one guy, is the reason they kept the hot dog?

Only applies to EU citizens' personal data, so while technically extraterritorial it doesn't feel like overreach in the same way.

> Universal jurisdiction laws

Rightly controversial when applied beyond things that are internationally agreed to be crimes against humanity, like torture or genocide.

> China's National Security Law

A perfect example of the kind of thing that the US used to define itself in opposition to.

Nations are sovereign and those with the might to push their requirements on others can do so. But I liked it better when we had a sense of the value of an open international order, where things like internet protocols were shared standards that everyone would collaborate on other than a handful of pariah states.

We're not talking about legal obligations in its home country though. I can buy Jack Daniels at age 19 in my country from their local subsidiary, and no-one thinks that this should be a crime for their US parent company because the US drinking age is higher. (Of course it would be a crime for either the parent or the subsidiary to sell to 19 year olds in the US)

(No-one is blaming Dell or Let's Encrypt here, to be clear, it's the US' excessive extraterritorial laws that are the problem)