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Notes -
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.
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.
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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