VoxelVexillologist
๐บ๐ธ Multidimensional Radical Centrist
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User ID: 64
VoxelVexillologist
๐บ๐ธ Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
Remember when Trump totally ended the deluge of illegal immigrants in a week using only executive power?
People cite this frequently, but I think the biggest change isn't one of law or even executive policy, but only one of stated preference. The Biden administration was perceived as being friendly to illegal immigrants asylum seekers, and when a flood showed up in response, then administrative choices (the CBP app, for example) demonstrated the perception to be broadly correct. So far, at least, it seems enough to merely change that perception, although I assume some actions to back it up would eventually be necessary.
VoxelVexillologist
๐บ๐ธ Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
ICE raids my workplace and I tell them Iโm Jose Gonzalez, Iโm a US citizen, and I donโt say another word the whole time. How could they affirmatively prove that Iโm not?
Lying to a federal officer (in this case about citizenship status) is a felony. It won't prove their case for them, but if they already had one current practice would allow them to tack on a "charged with felony" qualifier that seems to have a much broader approval rate with the public for rapid deportation.
Being silent might prove an alternative strategy, but I'm definitely not in a position to provide legal advice here.
VoxelVexillologist
๐บ๐ธ Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
This is the law in Japan for any non-Japanese. You must carry proof of your status at all times--the ๅคๅฝไบบ็ป้ฒ่จผ or popularly-known "gaijin card," which indicates your visa status. Everyone here who stays longer than 3 months gets one (students, those employed, etc.) except maybe diplomats. This is in lieu of carrying your passport, which visitors (under 3 months) are required to do.
I feel like this is pretty standard for all the non-US countries I've visited worldwide, at least on paper. I will admit to, say, going for a run and leaving my passport at the hotel, but in theory I've been required to carry it with me at all times. As far as I know, this is true in the US too: green card holders are supposed to carry it with them at all times, and visitors are supposed to carry their passports, although citizens are not required to do so (but if you are carrying such ID, you may be compelled to display it). Actual checks seem less frequent outside of ports of entry (and the occasional border patrol checkpoint further from the border).
On one hand, I respect the American tradition of civil liberties, but on the other I have trouble being alarmed at backsliding into fascism by adopting policies that checks notes align with every other first world country.
VoxelVexillologist
๐บ๐ธ Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
Does he think the United States government has, by itself, the capacity to replicate 1% of all intra-country flight capacity? To multiple different countries around the world? To do this every day for a year? I am skeptical.
The US government has contracts with commercial airlines as part of the Civil Reserve Air Fleet to support DOD needs in emergencies, presumably in advance of their other customers.
I don't think this would be popular, but the mechanism at least exists.
VoxelVexillologist
๐บ๐ธ Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
Young people live in a world where they constantly have doors slammed in their face.
Worse, "ghosting" has become ubiquitous in dating and employment, so doors aren't even being slammed. They just disappear without feedback.
VoxelVexillologist
๐บ๐ธ Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
Even more boring: the files implicate intelligence collection methods that would be embarrassing to admit existing. "We know he's not an Israeli asset because we've wiretapped the entire country of Israel and nobody ever mentioned him as an asset" is probably overstating the US power level, but is an example of something that isn't directly germane but would cause international relations trouble if it got out. IIRC there was that incident involving Merkel I think a decade or so ago.
VoxelVexillologist
๐บ๐ธ Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
In general I consider aesthetics-based zoning rules to be a left-leaning preference, and many of those are varying degrees of "traditional": I've heard Europeans in touristy cities complain that installing a heat pump is difficult because they can't visibly change the facade. Or San Francisco requiring expensive custom woodwork for similar reasons. Santa Fe codified "traditional" adobe as an architectural requirement, and I've suspected some "cute" small American towns I've visited do similarly to manage their aesthetics.
If anything, architectural free-for-all seems a bit of a libertarian aesthetic, and it's popularity in the US strikes me as a remaining vestage of the nation's cultural focus on "liberty".
VoxelVexillologist
๐บ๐ธ Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
Compare the programming concept of recursively subdividing an area into ever-smaller pieces as a quadtree.
The original zip code system was designed to simplify mail routing in a similar fashion. It's somewhat duplicative of the rest of the street address, but it was implemented to improve efficiency, despite occasional complaints about its supposed nonsensibility (not aligning with political boundaries, etc). The Irish solution is an interesting take on it with fully computerized sorting available, but there are legitimate questions about the comparative expense of renumbering everything versus the existing systems.
VoxelVexillologist
๐บ๐ธ Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
No doctor, sports PT or coach has ever quite told me that though, probably because it's considered rude and most people can't reliably and significantly affect their weight.
Serious coaches and such also have to be careful because eating disorders are common among (elite) endurance athletes: "if losing 10 pounds made me faster before, let's try it again" only works a finite number of times. There is a point, which I would doubt you've hit so far, at which losing weight is actually detrimental or harmful to more general health (hugely increased injury risk).
VoxelVexillologist
๐บ๐ธ Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
The US was rather close to getting Newfoundland in 1948.
VoxelVexillologist
๐บ๐ธ Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
I think that would have been possible as a goal six months ago. Less so, today. Although that would probably require more harmonization of national security and immigration concerns, I think compromises could have been worked out.
VoxelVexillologist
๐บ๐ธ Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
cheap cotton and rum and tea
Sometimes I'm amused that many commodities that launched empires --- spices, tea, sugar --- are largely now available cheaply at my local grocery store. A box of tea bags is a couple bucks, and pepper is put out freely on restaurant tables. Sugar is abundant enough to cause health risks from excess!
VoxelVexillologist
๐บ๐ธ Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
On the American side, I can see a case to be made for "stronger together" generally, but I feel like if Trump were serious about this, he's going the wrong way: winning hearts and minds would be the first step to doing so.
On the other hand, there are relatively few (peaceful) examples of nations unifying successfully. Notionally the EU seems to intend to do that, with discrete steps taken, but hasn't agreed to form, say, a single army together yet. The US Constitutional Convention maybe counts as an example, and IMO proves the point that we are stronger united as 50 states, but if you were trying to do it today, I can't imagine getting Texas, Florida, California, and New York to agree both to throw in their lot together and to let DC be in charge of them.
VoxelVexillologist
๐บ๐ธ Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
I suppose that's true, but I think the modal shoddy government decision looks more like spending absurd amounts on high speed rail that never materializes. Deaths at the hand of the government outside of wartime are pretty small in number (cops shooting people, the death penalty, maybe bad disaster planning). The PEPFAR example I'd broadly agree with, but the emotional valence of "caused death" versus "didn't save life" strikes me as not quite equivalent: if you accept that wholesale, then how many have you killed by not liquidating your life savings and giving to EA causes?
On the corporate side, you could look at Thomas Midgley, who was instrumental in popularizing leaded gasoline and freon, with drastic effects on probably tens of millions of lives. And the anti-car folks (I am not a hardcore believer) might have you found the tens of thousands of motor vehicle fatalities there in the US annually against the industry too.
VoxelVexillologist
๐บ๐ธ Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
Poor aerospace and automotive engineering can also kill. Ask Boeing how that's working out for them (hundreds of deaths from the MAX debacle). SpaceX has a surprisingly good, if imperfect, record, but Tesla seems to get a surprising number of OSHA complaints, and some of their vehicle design decisions (the emergency door release in the back seat of the 3 series, and such) suggest they don't take safety as seriously as Toyota, much less Volvo.
VoxelVexillologist
๐บ๐ธ Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
Alexander's birthplace is in modern Greece, but we've probably stumbled into two deep, opposing wells of nationalism: It's now "North Macedonia" which was IIRC a requirement to get Greece to agree to it's joining NATO.
"I deserve this territory because our leader founded the cities"
Ah, I see we have a new contender: "All cities named Alexandria rightfully belong to Greece except maybe the one in Virginia." Maybe the US should have handed Afghanistan and Iraq over to them.
ETA: Sarcasm, if unclear.
VoxelVexillologist
๐บ๐ธ Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
The International Rules Based Order was always fiction
The phrase itself reminds me of a legal maxim "If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts; If you have the law on your side, pound the law; if you have neither the facts nor the law, pound the table". It seems that blaming your opponents for violating Rules is at least a bit of a fall-back when realpolitik doesn't get your desired outcome --- say, being unwilling or unable to directly force your desired political outcome through kinetic or other means.
VoxelVexillologist
๐บ๐ธ Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
We discussed flow restrictions on showerheads last week, but I think the conservative view here sees electric car (mandates) coming from the same voices that brought us water-saving showerheads, and expect similar results. Sure, there might be some modest improvement in residential water usage (which is pretty immaterial outside of California, Nevada, and Arizona), but it comes at a cost those writing regulations refuse to admit, and so there is an expectation that we'll all be stuck with terrible cars "for the environment".
See also being forced to ride the bus ("take mass transit!"), or use CFLs back when they had terrible spectra. The conservative view here fears being forced to take quality of life hits "for the greater good" by someone who has drastically different values defining quality of life. On the other hand, I think (good) LED lightbulbs have proven themselves better than incandescent in almost every way short of an Easy-Bake oven, so it isn't always a miss.
VoxelVexillologist
๐บ๐ธ Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
flooding Russia with heroin
This sounds believable given rumblings about Afghan poppy crops, but do you have any sources for this?
VoxelVexillologist
๐บ๐ธ Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
Where do you think Russia fits in on that scale? I don't have a sense for the size of drone forces on either side there.
Also drone warfare seems a pretty clear loss for the US in the last decade: I remember 15 years ago DARPA (or maybe some other part of defense) was funding quadrotor control research, but even though that looked interesting at the time, they weren't the ones to operationalize it first, and still don't seem to have (announced) plans to do so.
IIRC Coalition forces were shot at enforcing no-fly zones in Iraq a few times without escalating into Desert Storm II (that came later, and largely for other reasons). But you do need to be confident enough to shake off anything thrown at you: it needs to look more like US destroyers shooting down drones in the Red Sea without flattening Yemen in a way that, although still asymmetric, I wouldn't expect US-Russia to match.
VoxelVexillologist
๐บ๐ธ Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
No-Fly Zone
Of the bunch, I think this one is ill-defined --- just larping as if this were Iraq versus the Kurds or Kosovo: the idea of "neutrally" grounding all air assets in the area being helpful to allies that didn't have any. Both Ukraine and Russia have established air forces and the West has even cobbled up aircraft to donate to their preferred side. Maybe it seemed useful in the first weeks when the survival of Ukraine's aircraft seemed questionable, but it's not something well-defined today, I think.
VoxelVexillologist
๐บ๐ธ Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
The remaining parts of Czechoslovakia were also annexed in 1939, handing over those armaments sectors too. The best defensive positions (and fortifications) against Germany were given up with the Sudetenland.
I think you'd be more likely to win this for those without work visas or other formal federal recognition, which is still a large number. "If you (1) sneak over the border and never talk to customs and immigration, or (2) if you overstay the terms of the visa through which you went through customs, you clearly don't see yourself as subject to the jurisdiction of the United States" strikes me as at least defensible, especially the former.
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