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ICE arrests superintendent of Iowa's largest public school district
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency arrested Ian Andre Roberts, who is the superintendent of the Des Moines (IA) public school district. If you've been following along with this aspect of the culture war, you probably figure he was arrested for abetting or protecting a student or faculty or staff member from them. But no; the guy is, according to ICE here illegally and was given a final order of removal in May 2024. ICE is strongly implying he never had any work authorization beyond a long-since-expired student visa. It seems to me pretty bold for someone here without work authorization to be in such a high-profile position. Even more surprising for him to be hired; the district claims to have done a background check on him; you would think this would result in them finding out he was not authorized to work and not being hired. Someone screwed up there.
Other aspects are that he had a weapons possession charge in Pennsylvania from 2021, but this was a pissant ("5th degree summary offense") thing about having his deer rifle on his seat still loaded. More serious is that he fled the ICE agents when stopped; his car was found with a loaded handgun, a hunting knife, and $3000 in cash. I don't much care about the illegal-alien-in-possession aspect; making a whole range of normal activities super-illegal based on a status offense is a tyrant's trick. But fleeing certainly seems to indicate a guilty mind rather than some sort of error or misunderstanding on ICEs part.
At first I thought they might have the wrong guy; there's an Ian Andre Roberts from Guyana who competed in the Olympics. But no, that's actually the same guy.
On reddit, /r/desmoines is up in arms... about the arrest, of course, not about the school district hiring a guy with no work authorization.
This is confusing on so many levels.
The district claims that he completed his I-9 verification. I can understand why they'd be in none the wiser. But to fake a citizenship ? He must have created a fake passport or a social security card. That's hard mode.
Why was he illegal in the first place ? A nation's olympic representative would qualify for an O1 with an instant EB-1 green card. Public school districts are also eligible for cap-exempt H1bs. He could've become a citizen legally by now, if he wanted to. I won't be surprised if this is a case of 'dude keeps choosing the contrived illegal option over the straightforward legal option because people can be selectively stupid like that'.
That aside, I am a big fan of national ID cards. The US should have one, and so should every other country. I don't understand why the right is so opposed to it. It's the easiest way to control illegal immigration.
I-9 only requires proof of identity and proof of eligibility to work in the US. Most people use a driver's license for the former and a Social Security card for the latter, neither of which requires citizenship. And the law only requires that the employer inspect the documents for their authenticity, not conduct an investigation to determine if the person is actually, at this moment, eligible to work in the US. He could have easily gotten a Social Security card when he was here legally on a student visa, and used that for all his I-9s.
The ones you get as a student prominently say something like "valid for work only with DHS authorization" on them, though.
Yep, citizen and green card holder social security cards look very different than that of visa holders.
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Same reason we don't use the metric system:
Revelation 13:16-17
This is overstating it a bit, but there is some portion of America that opposed the metric system and opposes things like national IDs or implantable payment chips as being "the mark of the beast". The beast being a seven-headed monstrous enemy of God. Or at least symbolically represented as such.
...the metric system? Really? Are you sure? I grew up on a lot of anti-metric-system propaganda but it was all just about it being smug Euro garbage that infringed on American pride and so on. And on the other hand I've heard a lot of interesting (conspiracy) theories on what the mark of the beast might be but none of them remotely resembled the metric system. That's unusually stupid.
There was a minor American evangelical opposition to bar codes and the metric system. Both accused of being the mark of the beast. I'm not clear if these people in particular were able to block it's adoption, but they existed.
Of the era ramblings in this manner.
Much more modern example of similar ramblings.
Accusations that the metric system is somehow linked to the mark of the beast originated in, at the latest, the 1870s. This is an OG conspiracy theory picked up by some Americans in the 1970s.
There are other fringe Christians also long opposed to metric system based on an unrelated understanding of the holy meaning of the inch. So metric system advocates are also working for the devil.
"Let's count units by 10s."
"The devil put you up to this?"
Kind of approximately the last century and a half. At least for some fringe minority.
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We don't use the metric system because it's not in the rational interests of people to switch. The imperial system sucks for kids (because they have to memorize the conversions), and if you have to do the math by hand I guess, but your typical adult already knows the conversions they need and has a calculator to handle the math. So they get no benefit, but would have to put up with learning all the new measurements. There's no upside for them.
What you describe is a textbook example of an inadequate equilibrium.
Most people will only need a few formulas. A carpenter is going to encounter yards, foots and inches, but unless they are building a really long fence, they are unlikely to encounter miles.
Still, it does create friction, making everything slightly more complicated than it would have to be, otherwise.
Not that SI is perfect, either. The Faraday constant being 96kC/mol instead of 1C/mol is not very reasonable, and the Boltzmann constant should be one as well. If I were to design a system from the scratch today, I would anchor mass so that a mole is a nice round number, like 1e24. Still, SI is a valiant effort, at least, and making it so that the density of water is approximately one (or 1000, if you go for cubic meters) was a brilliant move for everyday usability.
As an European, I have happily never been subject to having to learn that there are 231 cubic inches in a US gallon. The closest I got to this was having to suffer through seven years of music education in school, which even in Europe used a terrible archaic notation which works well to represent C major which was then improperly extended in a way which would make even ISO 8859-* blush with shame. Exams had tasks like "transpose this melody to a different scale", which would be utterly trivial in any adequate system -- "add three to every integer on this list". In short, it was the equivalent of a math class deciding to teach multiplication with Roman numerals.
Personally, I found this to be a big turn-off. Reasonably smart kids will grasp the difference between things being complicated because they are intrinsically complicated (there is no way to make pi come out to be three in Euclidian geometry) and things being complicated because none of the practitioners could be arsed to make them less complicated. So if I had had a physics teacher who was a proponent of imperial units and expecting me to learn all the weird conversion factors decreed by Queen Anne or whomever, I would reasonably have concluded that physicists have no interest in describing the world in easy terms and instead use their cleverness to build pointless mind mazes for their own amusement.
As an American, I have never been subject to that either. Europeans love to bust out obscure conversions that nobody knows as evidence for the imperial system being bad, but nobody knows it because nobody needs to ever make that conversion. So who cares? I long ago memorized the very short list of conversions one encounters in everyday life:
I'm willing to concede that metric conversions are easier than these. But they aren't hard to learn either, and there aren't that many of them. It's not actually onerous in practice. I think that the inadequate equilibrium framing is not wrong, but it risks overstating the extent to which the equilibrium is actually causing problems in anyone's life.
You can easily derive the 5280 feet from 3 feet to a yard, 440 yards to a quarter mile.
Except troy pounds which are 12 (slightly larger) ounces. Though if you're dealing with troy pounds you can hire someone to remember that. Also the ton can be the long ton of 2240 lbs.
And 2 tbsp to the fluid ounce.
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I never quite understood why Europeans think that somehow there is a huge amount of friction with the every day usage of US customary units. They are customary for a reason.
Like if a carpenter in the US dealing with dimensional lumber the US you deal with a 2x6 on 2 foot centers. That is nominally 2 inches by 6 inches, but of course not actually. If you were building the same wall in Europe you are dealing with a 6x2 on 60 cm centers. That is nominally 6 by 2 cols but actually 148 mm by 48 mm. No one who does not deal with that stuff every day has to care about why the nominal or exact dimensions are not the same in either system. People who deal with it every day are used to it and there would be a cost for them to switch. Clearly 2 and 6 as nominal measurements are easier to deal with than exact measurements of 148 and 48, that's why there is a customary unit that those timbers are still sold in. Marking off in units of 60 is not easier than marking off in units of 2. 60 is used because it is divisible by 3 while the nice round 50 is not. This is not a problem in customary units because the next unit down from feet is already divisible by 3.
There is also the strange habit of talking up the metric system, but then acting like everything is in SI. This is not the case. For scientific use CGS is still extremely common for practicing professionals.
There are also extremely common metric customary units that are in use that are not SI. You still have to specify the unit, no one who regularly deals with a given application is confused by that unit, and if you have to make a conversion it's trivial to look up. This is exactly the same as if you deal with US customary units.
For example tire pressures are often quoted in the metric customary Bar in Europe. The SI unit of pressure is the Pascal. You also see in the extant literature depending of field: technical atmospheres, standard atmospheres, Torr, and mmHg. That's 6 metricish systems for the same unit. No one who deals with Bar when they pump up their tiers and Torr when they pump down their vacuum chamber gets confused or thinks its hard. Just like no one who deals with psi when they pump up their tiers and Torr when they pump down their vacuum chamber gets confused or thinks its hard.
The Americans similarly often seem to think that there's a huge amount of friction in the everyday use of the metric, though. "Lol do women in Europe put "no men under 182.88 cm" in their dating ads?" No, though they might put no men under 180 cm.
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I think it's because the United States already uses imperial, switching over carries a cost, the United States is large enough that there is no pressure to switch for the sake of standardisation with neighbours, and the United States is historically quite bad at top-down standardisation and national reform. There are fifty states, some might embrace metric and some would resist it, and the federal government would struggle to make it compulsory - it would incur both state resistance and widespread popular resistance. Whichever government tries to make the switch is going to face a lot of complaints, and the other party is inevitably going to seize the issue and portray themselves as soming to save your measurements. Lastly, Americans hate being made to conform with the rest of the world - there is a very strong sense of national exceptionalism and defiance. The ingrained sense of "but we're different" wins out - from everything from climate agreements to conventions on landmines, the US has a tradition of being the exception. Telling the rest of the world to piss off usually goes down well domestically. It's a bit like the British attitude to EU regulations, or the Japanese attitude to whaling. Maybe on its own it wasn't a big issue, but the moment it becomes an issue of pushy, arrogant foreigners telling us what we ought to do, the US goes, "You know what? I'm gonna start doing it even harder."
Disclaimer: I'm Australian, Imperial units are garbage, metric is superior.
There's also just a massive amount of equipment, material, hardware, and even facilities designed around imperial units, sometimes practically irreplaceable. Switching over to metric, even solely for new projects, isn't just or even mostly a matter of getting people to use new units on drawings.
But again: somehow the rest of the world did. Their precious tooling using only Troy ounces, Whitworth screws and French inches except when needing å°º instead was swapped decades ago. Weird how the other 96% of the globe somehow managed.
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It doesn't really help the "switch to metric" argument that unit conversions are typically done by computer these days anyway. The marginal cost of doing calculations in "harder" units isn't worth it because the calculations aren't really the hard part any more. Consumer products are pretty universally labelled with both, but the imperial units are round numbers: the box in front of me here is "16 oz (1 lb) 454 g".
Raw material stock sizes are probably a more difficult transition at this point: changing to size of the "2x4" (1.5 x 3.5 inches, naturally) would impact pretty much all construction heavily with seemingly little upside.
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I think the best bet would be California mandating metric. "If you want your products sold in CA, they have to state weights in kg and dimensions in meters. Gas stations are required to (also) display liters for fuel and hPa for tire pressure." Most manufacturers would probably print both imperial and SI units on their products.
Almost all products sold at my grocery store are labelled in both metric and imperial. A quick search suggests this has been federal law since 1992, with a few exceptions.
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Weird the entire rest of world somehow switched.
Yeah, weird. Almost as though they had different conditions which led to them taking different actions.
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They almost all either switched prior to mass education and industrialization in their countries, or they half-assed it and ended up with a weird Frankenstein system like the UK, Canada, and Australia
Most of Europe also did not switch entirely voluntarily. Probably the best thing Napoleon ever did. Too bad he never invaded England, though.
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The only thing Australians generally still do in Imperial is human height measurement.
In Canada:
Air temperature (as in the weather) is in C. Pool temperatures are in F. Cooking temperatures are in F. Body temperature in F.
Short distances are in In/Ft/Yd, but laws often are written with metric (for instance, in driving), but travel distances are in km.
People's weight and height are in Lbs and Ft/In.
Volume units in cooking are lol whatever; there's a preference for imperial measures but you'll have to deal with stuff in liters too (milk, soft drinks are sold by the L or 2L).
Note also that:
Canada's a great case study for why English Imperial measurements are better than
French Imperialmetric when you're operating on human-sized scales. But then again, that's not what the French were going for when they designed that system, they designed it with the intent on forcing it on everyone else at gunpoint under the banner of rationalism.But there's a reason nobody copies the French.
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That's my experience, anecdotally. People sometimes measure things in feet and inches, but I take that as just because feet are a practically useful, everyday measure that there isn't a good metric equivalent for. Every now and then I hear people say 'miles', but at least in my generation, every time I hear 'mile', I need to mentally multiply by 1.6 in order to visualise what it means.
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Because it will not be so used. We already have sanctuary cities which house most of the illegal immigrants in the nation. Their cops will be mandated to not check that, as they currently are in those jurisdictions.
If you actually look at the US laws, you would observe that it is seemingly a very strong immigration code that should already be easily able to deal with the illegal immigration problem. The reality is tens of millions of illegals in America. How? Sand in the gears. No law can get rid of the sand. You could try to mitigate it by hiring millions more ICE agents and immigration judges. The sand throwers would re-direct enough of their efforts to preventing that hiring to continue to stifle you.
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Moreover, in many other democracies that the US left idolizes, every contact with the government ends up being a check for immigration status, similar to how in the US all police will run you for warrants.
American liberals do not understand that the US has by far the most permissive immigration policy in the developed world.
It depends. Annual immigration as a proportion of the total population is low relative to other Anglo countries and most of Western Europe.
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And recently one of the most permissive abortion policies.
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I think most don't truly oppose it, but it risks alienating some member of their coalition, the sovereign citizen, anti-government types who think not having a national ID is impeding the federal government.
Well, it seems to kind of work. Can't remember how many times i've read news that so and so has been in the US illegally and occupying a high position almost reaching congress or whatever while being illegal.
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No, the US is much harsher than that -- you need an Olympic MEDAL to automatically qualify, though I believe even bronze is accepted. Without that, an olympic athlete needs 3 of 10 criteria. Though two should be easy:
Evidence of receipt of lesser nationally or internationally recognized prizes or awards for excellence (anyone who gets on a national olympic team should have this)
Evidence of your membership in associations in the field which demand outstanding achievement of their members (the Olympic team itself should qualify)
Given those, he'd need to have one of
Evidence of published material about you in professional or major trade publications or other major media
Evidence that you have been asked to judge the work of others, either individually or on a panel
Evidence of your original scientific, scholarly, artistic, athletic, or business-related contributions of major significance to the field
Evidence of your performance of a leading or critical role in distinguished organizations
Evidence that you command a high salary or other significantly high remuneration in relation to others in the field
Without any of them, no EB-1 for you.
I mean he was in the Olympics, it shouldn't be hard to dig up some "evidence of published material about [him] in ... other major media"?
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This one's basically a free space. Reviewed coworker's code? Check. Gave your teammate feedback on their performance? Check. Etc.
No, you need evidence that you've been asked to do it. Informal stuff that doesn't generate such evidence won't work.
Code review has a paper trail. It's easy to make a paper trail for reviewing your teammate's performance too.
You're not thinking outside the box.
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As someone who is opposed to it, what I'm most worried about is the possibility of the government being able to 'unperson' someone. I live in Canada, where the government literally banned people who had not taken the COVID vaccine from entering a lot of establishments, enforced by presenting positive proof that you had been vaccinated. This severely curtailed my ability to participate in society until the restrictions ended.
Here are some of the wonderful things that a government could do with a national ID, ranked approximately in order of how long it would take the slippery slope to get to that point.
One thing I think is a very big disconnect between the left and the right is that a lot of the right (the libertarian/small government part) sees governments as (at best) a necessary evil, while the left doesn't necessarily think of it the same way. As someone who has libertarian leanings, what I see is that the government is constantly expanding its own power, while making decisions that are not to the benefit of the majority of its constituents. Elections tend to be shams, as we don't get to vote on the policies we actually want - we instead vote only on the policies we are allowed to vote on (for example, a large portion of Brexit was people voting against immigration; but the government decided it wanted more immigration anyways, so did that all on their own; in the last Canadian election, none of the parties that have ever formed government before ran on decreasing immigration - and we have roughly the same absolute amount of immigration as the US does, with 1/10 of the population). Here are the results of the last Canadian election; notice all the blue in Western Canada? It doesn't make a difference at all, as Quebec and Ontario voted to continue allowing Central Canada to loot the piggy bank in the west (and from my awareness, this occurs in the US too; cities have a lot of seats, and overwhelm the nearby countryside, even though the policies that are desired by the city are not in the best interests of the countryside). They also constantly violate their own rules; in Canada, it was determined that the prime minister, Justin Trudeau, was 'not justified' in breaking up the convoy protest against him and his COVID policies. He suffered no consequences for this action. The order in the Canadian military to take the COVID vaccine was determined to be unlawful; however, by the time the ruling came through, it was too late to seek recompense for it (as a member of my family personally experienced).
To take a slightly more 'hinged' take on it; right now, in the US, I think it's fairly safe to say that a large percentage of leftists consider the current government to not only be illegitimate, but evil on top of that. I can assure you that when Biden was in charge, a large percentage of rightists considered it to be the same situation. Both parties spend approximately 50% of the time feeling like they're under siege from a government completely unaligned with their values; why would they ever accept anything that would make it easier for the government to do evil things to them?
You don't need a new form of ID to track this. Multi-use transit cards already let you track their movement and if you bought them with a card, are linked with your identity. If bought with cash, you leave enough PII around the Internet even if you click "reject all" on every cookie banner that you can just buy a "people that live in A and commute to B by bus" dataset from them that includes their phone numbers. Another dataset from mobile phone operators later and you can find out which one rode that particular bus.
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I'm sure you don't need reminding that the Canadian government weaponized the financial system against domestic dissent during the Freedom Convoy, but it's worth pointing out that's the sort of action that "first-world Western democracies" now consider appropriate (even if the courts eventually disagreed, and even that is still under appeal).
Such governments should not be trusted with the ability to issue national ID cards, and since it's clear that even "liberal democracies" can evolve into this sort of government, they shouldn't be trusted with them either.
@anon_ is correct that the government is a necessary evil, but even before COVID I felt that it should be kept as small as possible. Now I think the argument is even clearer.
This may be true, but the price of accepting that (for us in the US) is that our government will never get a handle around removable aliens.
there wasn't a national ID in 1954 and yet the Eisenhower administration expelled the vast majority of removable aliens they targeted
identifying illegals and removing them isn't difficult to accomplish because of a lack of national id, it's difficult to accomplish because the government and powerful interest groups don't want it to happen
it's not some big mystery where the vast bulk of illegals are in the US and it's relatively easy to identify the overwhelming vast bulk of them once they're encountered (race, language, documents)
the reason the right doesn't want national id is because it just gives even more power to the federal government which, for approx 80 years, may as well be structured specifically to harm the right
whether or not it's possible this increased power would make it marginally easier to id illegals doesn't matter because that's not what it would be used for and we know that because there are already on the books strict laws and requirements which are not followed or used
We should revisit this in a year or two to assess whether Trump's ICE, plus all the funding it got from the OBB, was able to accomplish this easy task.
the point is specifically about national id
if in a year or two, with vast resources or whatever you're implying, and the removable aliens haven't been removed, are you really trying to imply the reason is because there is no national id?
that's silly so I'm going to assume you were trying to make another point
what is it?
No, that’s kind of my point actually. Even employers that want to verify applicants aren’t able to do so accurately.
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A government that cannot maintain territorial integrity is a government I consider to be "too small".
Well there ya go -- now we're at the point of tradeoffs with respect to the functions that are absolutely necessary.
It would be kinda silly if we both had government as a necessary evil and it was too disempowered to actually accomplish those ends.
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I believe the standard rebuttal is "cannot ≠will not".
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I think the libertarian right is coming around to the fact that government is a necessary evil, and to that end it needs the powers to effect those necessary functions competently.
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