If I were extremely cynical, I would suspect they might have intentionally falsified that response to make it seem like they were more naive than they actually were.

The idea that Google’s lack of knowledge of you a decade ago is somehow related to what they know today is naive. Dangerously naive, I would say. Ad targeting technology (= knowledge about you) is shocking good now.

Creepy and oppressive, go figure.

I think you're on about the ad preferences settings or whatever? I usually wipe those.

Hes def not a good guy lmao.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/37457418/eric-schmidt-mistress...

100% that is exactly what happened and in public

Just invoking Richard Stallman will prove it because the smear campaign on him was so thorough.

Linus seems to be the only one that made it out.

Yes, I remember that period of conscious choice, and the fence-sitting or rationalizing.

The thing about "Don't Be Evil" at the time, is that (my impression was) everyone thought they knew what that meant, because it was a popular sentiment.

The OG Internet people I'm talking about aren't only the Levy-style hackers, with strong individualist bents, but there was also a lot of collectivism.

And the individualists and collectivists mostly cooperated, or at least coexisted.

And all were pretty universally united in their skepticism of MBAs (halfwits who only care about near-term money and personal incentives), Wall Street bros (evil, coming off of '80s greed-is-good pillaging), and politicians (in the old "their lips are moving" way, not like the modern threats).

Of course it wasn't just the OG people choosing. That period of choice coincided with an influx of people who previously would've gone to Wall Street, as well as a ton of non-ruthless people who would just adapt to what culture they were shown. The money then determined the culture.

Yes but its a slang term that just means original/old-school now (unless you're an actual criminal maybe).

It's mostly meaning "original". The OG XBox for example.

Yep, the 70s Crips and Ice-T somehow made it into everyday speech.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/37457418/eric-schmidt-mistress...

erm hes a creep, claimed to be rapist... not many redeemable qualities.

Abusive relationships aren't always easy to escape. Even more so when the partner is extremely rich and powerful.

[dead]

So he was willing to make a business deal with the country that executes gay people, as long as HE wasn't in danger? Legitimizing their regime is perfectly OK if it doesn't affect him? The fact that he was negotiating with them makes that incident look even worse for him, not Gawker

"you dont just out people without their consent, and that goes for rich or poor."

Nah fuck him. If you're closeted and funding anti-queer causes and politicians you deserve to be outed.

Maybe his social media profiles at the time (public, because I'm not "friends" with him) shouldn't have included photos and posts about gay cruise ship vacations.

Or perhaps don't do business with people who would happily execute you? All that says to me is Thiel values money over anything else.

The insinuation that Gawker in any way shape or form "outed" him is just laughable.

Gawker is absolutely trash media, to be quite clear.

> and that goes for rich or poor

I do agree about this, for certain things - but in others, no - and indeed, courts have ruled that billionaires are inherently "public figures"... "due to their outsized influence on public affairs and opinion".

I also have significant issues with his bankrolling of Hogan's lawsuit against Gawker as an abomination of the legal system, including the right to face one's "accuser":

- Hogan had already agreed in principle to a part ownership stake and profits of Gawker.

- Lawyers paid for by Thiel pushed for him to drop that and push instead for bankrupting Gawker through damages (which were laughable, see below). (Hypothetical question, if you're an attorney, ostensibly representing Hogan, but you know the person paying your bills, Thiel, wants a different outcome for the case, when push comes to shove, whose interests are you going to represent? See the following point too).

- When the case and awarded damages -did- actually threaten to bankrupt Gawker, Thiel/Hogan's lawyers did the most illogical thing possible, if they were looking to recoup any money for their ostensible client... they dropped the one claim against Gawker that would have allowed their liability insurance to at least partially pay out.

(Re damages: The amount that Hogan had originally asked for seemed reasonable. Then after Thiel's lawyers got involved, the amount asked for was multiplied five thousand times.

This included economic damages of fifty million dollars. For a man who had made something in the order of $10-15M his entire career? Who had a net worth at its peak of $30M, and at the time of the lawsuit of $8M? I highly doubt that TV stations pulling reruns of old WWF events, lost hair commercial and other endorsements was worth that. (They separately asked for emotional damages, too, to be clear. But there was near zero justification for this economic damages claim.)

I wonder how much Thiel paid Hogan under the table for this proxy lawsuit?

[dead]

I wasn't sharing that because I think he's right. I was sharing it to show what kind of person we are talking about...

Yet. But another year or two of progress on AI deepfakes and you will be talking to a bot and be none the wiser.

I think one of the issues is that bots can flood the zone faster than reasonable/rational humans can counter them.

Bots are not necessary for indoctrination, Fox does that already. But bots help creating dissent and make people busy defending against all the crap.

You can buy black powder guns over the counter in france and easily make or import the black powder from elsewhere in the EU. A black powder revolver is damn good for self defense, just needs maintained more frequently so the powder doesn't go bad.

Also note of sale (underground, also trivially made on one's own) in france is also FGC-9 pistols (modern gun + ammo easily made in short time in france, all with unregulated components), and attackers in france have also used re-activated decommissioned rifles.

Your country is awash in guns for anyone who wants it.

ICE officials are pretty consistently saying that they do more visible immigration enforcement in places where the local police are forbidden by local or state law from giving information about people they arrest to ICE, compared to places where the local police do this happily. Legally-forbidding local police from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement is a prototypically blue-state policy that red states do not generally do.

The visible disruptive protests against ICE activity are also the sort of thing that you'd expect the sorts of voters that make a blue state blue to do, so when ICE does arrest illegal immigrants in red states, there's much fewer people who are inclined to protest it and therefore less publicity in general.

they are arresting and deporting people in Texas I'm under the assumption that they can perform more than one task at a time.

https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/ice-houston-arrests-more-3...

Great question, most Trump supporters are extremely unhappy he’s not doing the mass deportations he promised and instead just doing tiny stunts in Minnesota. Basically neither the right nor left are happy with this admin.

It’s more on the level of a speeding ticket.

Yeah, I agree. The emphasis on expanded field enforcement is backwards. If millions of people are "illegal" primarily because they are stuck in multi-year backlogs, then the failure is in the court and asylum system, not in a lack of raids.

From a systems perspective, we're heavily funding the most expensive and disruptive part of the pipeline (identification and removal) while starving the part that actually resolves legal status (adjudication, asylum review, work authorization). Though maybe that's a feature of this administration, not a bug.

If the goal is public safety, prioritizing people who commit violent crimes makes sense. If the goal is restoring legal order, then yeah, the obvious first step is to drive the backlog toward zero. I don't think that's the administration's goal though.

To add onto that, Palantir is a private company. They have no business having that much of my data without my consent, with no way to opt out.

No and it never has

It only works for people the state expects significant amounts of money from (taxes don’t count)

Don’t expect a government to help you unless you’re one of its larger donors

it does, yeah. people love to examine exceptions and determine that the system they appeared within should be dismantled, it's all over the place.

It doesn't assume anything. It's literally what's happening right now. All of your neighbors don't want to steal all of your stuff. Think about the fact that this is only true in certain places, regardless of what laws exist. Laws have very little effect on criminal behavior. Your peers being cool people are all that really protects your safety and your property.

It's disingenuous to say Americans are "allowing" themselves to do anything in the face of countless, relentless, multi-billion corporate campaigns, designed by teams of educated individuals, to make them think and act in specific ways.

The older I get the more disconnected I feel from some of the posters on this site. I can't remember exactly when I joined, 2012ish maybe? But the takes people have seem to be getting wilder and wilder.

My interpretation: advocating for privacy without making effort to avoid a large part of the society goes "crazy" will not protect you much on the long term.

I do like "engineering solutions" (ex: not storing too much data), but I start to think it is important to make more effort on more broad social, legal and political aspects.

> Its purpose is to scan

That's its ostensible, purported, show purpose.

The real purpose is to break end to end encryption to increase government surveillance and power. "But think of the children" or "be afraid of the terrorists" are just the excuses those in power rotate through to to achieve their true desired ends.

I wouldn't be surprised that Trump goes one step further. He is so unleashed, and irrational. This guy is a liability for humanity

Harder than ethnicity or sexual orientation or religion?

I think it must depend on the country, right?

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These are both true statements, but there's a huge difference in scale.

The UK arrests 12,000 people per year for social media posts ( https://freedomhouse.org/country/united-kingdom/freedom-net/... ), for a broad range of vague reasons including causing offense. That's far more than much larger totalitarian nations like Russia and China.

The US arrests folks for direct online threats of violence - a much higher bar.

Link?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law

>despots don't care about the law

This is such a low probability scenario that I don't think it's worth the average person to worry about.

I feel "people should not have have consequences for what they say", and "people should be able to avoid consequences for what they have done", are separate concepts. One does not require believing in the other. For example I believe the former, but for the latter I believe everyone should be punished when they break the law.

Not as clever as it may sound. It is perfectly possible that someone has nothing to hide in a good way, whereas someone without anything to say for himself cannot be easily imagined as a good faith social individual. So in a way this is comparing apples to bad apples and claiming they are perfectly equal.

I'm not out to defend "I've got nothing to hide", but those who say it are usually saying it about a specific policy (e.g. the NSA monitoring searches). It's usually clear what the context is and that's what you have to argue against to actually engage and convince someone. They probably do mean quite literally that they have nothing to hide from the government. It's not an extreme statement in context.

But on the internet we often do this thing where we take the weakest version or a distorted version of an opposing side's argument and ridicule that. It's not quite strawmanning because we never specified who we're arguing against, and surely we can imagine someone, somewhere on the internet has the ridiculous viewpoint. But it's not a common viewpoint (that, for example, we shouldn't have privacy in the bathroom). Doing this only gets us pats on the back from those who already agree with us and deludes us about our opponent's position.

It's not that amazing. The Republican party has repeatedly demonstrated my entire life that their goal is power and all stated ideals can and will be sacrificed as needed to achieve that goal.

We get things like philandering individuals running on family values platforms, anti-gay individuals being caught performing gay sex acts in restaurant bathrooms, crowing about deficits and the national debt during Democrat administrations while cutting taxes and increasing spending during Republican administrations, blocking Supreme Court nominations because it's "too close to an election" while pushing through another Supreme Court nomination mere weeks before a subsequent election, etc.

The fuel running the Republican political machine is bad faith.

They haven’t turned against their principles. Party is the principle. You’re just confused because you thought their stated principles were real.

I spent too much of the 90s listening to Rush Limbaugh and consuming other conservative media and the exact same contradictions were prominently on display then. They absolutely excoriated law enforcement for things like the Waco siege. The phrase “jack-booted thugs” got used. But when LAPD beat the shit out of Rodney King on video, suddenly police could do no wrong.

> shows how many people care more about party than principle

"Trump’s net approval rating on immigration has declined by about 4 points since the day before Good’s death until today. Meanwhile, his overall approval rating has declined by 2 points and is near its second-term lows" [1].

I'd encourage anyone watching to actually pay attention to "how many people care more about party than principle." I suspect it's fewer than MAGA high command thinks.

[1] https://www.natesilver.net/p/trump-is-losing-normies-on-immi...

I guess this is an example of FAFO? This is what the NRA wanted, now they got to find out how what happens when there are too many guns and too many idiots with guns masquerading as law enforcement. The guy had every right to have a gun, and the masked tyrants had no right to kill him for it.

[flagged]

They are not where I would hold them to if they were truly a principled organization and not largely a political tool for the far-right on any and every talking point, but we got far more out of them than we usually do.

They publicly called out a Trump appointee for saying you're not allowed to bring a gun to a protest, and have urged that there be an investigation in to what occurred.

They also then blamed it on the MN government, because for some reason CBP (250 miles from a border, and thus 150 miles away from their remit...) pretending to be police officers when they also lack a remit to do that and them then fucking things up and murdering people because of the lack of remit, lack of training, lack of screening on the hiring... is because of Walz and co.

So... better than I expected, but still pretty dogshit.

[flagged]

> Republicans represent half the country

This statement isn't necessarily wrong because about half of elected government officials are Republican, but I want to point out that less than 60% of eligible Americans voted in 2024, so we're talking about <30% of Americans who vote Republican.

27%* https://news.gallup.com/poll/700499/new-high-identify-politi...

>some isolated sect living in small town Appalachia.

Calvinists or Evangelicals?

I don't think that holds water either way.

You're saying EU is any different to USA?

Palantir clients: Europol, Danish POL-INTEL, NHS UK, UK Ministry of Defence, German Police (states), NATO, Ukraine, ASML, Siemens, Airbus, Credit Suisse, UBS, BP, Merck, ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies#Customer...

https://www.palantir.com/partners/international/

I didn't say it was totally nonfunctional, I said they can't do business differently than they are currently doing.

"China can, due to mandatory 996 work hours"

Where can I follow this development

The Rights are not intended as preemptive. You don't have a right to free speech b/c otherwise maybe the government regulation of speech will get out of hand. You have it because it's espoused as a fundamental right. Same with separation of church and state. It's like "Well maybe a future evil government will regulate the church poorly, so lets ban it completely". It's just seen as an area the government shouldn't delve in entirely.

Collecting information about people doesn't really fit the same mold. It's not sensible to remove that function entirely. It's not a right. And it's not sensible to structure things with the expectation the future government will be evil

principle is sometimes indistinguishable from fantasy

'systematically' doing a lot of work here/ It happens, you know it happens, the fact that it's not supposed to happen doesn't validate that.

>This is systematically not true as citizens can not be legally deported.

And yet.

>If someone is not a citizen and are here illegally they should be removed, no matter their intentions. If you are willing to break the law to stay here, I personally don't want them back in the country.

Without even getting into the subject of kids who are brought here.. I just have to say, why? Immigrants are net contributors in the US. Many of these people who are here "illegally" are in a bureaucratic maze and are attempting to follow the rules. Some aren't, sure, but we live in a society where we don't draconianly punish people for a certain level of breaking the rules in cases where there is no real harm done. And I say deportation, particularly to 3rd country like the USA is doing now sometimes, qualifies as very draconian.

> >They arrest and deport US citizens

> This is systematically not true as citizens can not be legally deported.

And yet

> The true scope of U.S. citizens wrongfully deported is not known as the federal government does not release data on how often members of this group are mistakenly detained or even removed from the country. However, The Washington Post estimated that there are at least 12 well-known cases, drawing conclusions from court records, interviews and news reports.

-- A Look At The U.S. Citizens Who Have Been Deported By The Trump Administration So Far

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/a-look-at-the-u-s-citizens...

We've banned this account for repeatedly posting antisemitic tropes.

How exactly would non-citizens, who do not have social security numbers or other valid identifying documents, receive medicaid? It's difficult enough for qualified people to get it. It would seem fairly difficult to pass the registration process without having a valid SSN. Furthermore, if someone was able to fraudulently sign up - say by using a stolen identity, then wouldn't the data in the system look valid and therefore not really show up on an audit?

And as the GP pointed out, it makes no sense to put the president's paramilitary agency¹ in charge of such an audit, rather than qualified auditors, perhaps from the HHS² OIG³.

1. https://www.newstatesman.com/world/americas/north-america/us...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_He...

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Inspector_General_(U...

The FBI was investigating the daycare fraud in February 2025. Unfortunately, some of the investigators got moved off this investigation to do anti-immigration work instead, reported by NYT last week.

if there are massive frauds, DOGE should've revealed that. The fact that people keep spewing no investigation while there should be several times shows how ignorant people is.

> The massive Somali fraud had no evidence

It's weird, then, that most of them (and it's, like, 60 Somalis out of 80k) were already on trial[0] a good month before ...

> a random YouTuber started knocking on quality learing center doors

"As of December 2025, subsequent investigations by state officials have not found evidence of fraud at the sites Shirley visited."

Oh no, that doesn't sound like a "massive Somali fraud", does it?

(Also he's not "a random YouTuber" - he's a former prankster turned full MAGA right-wing agitator[1] and that should tell you all you need to know about his credentials and honesty.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feeding_Our_Future

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Shirley ("he repeated a false claim", "has falsely implied", "also amplified Trump's false claim", etc.)

Not true. NYTimes had reported on it

Are you not aware that that story you just repeated was propaganda from the start, and completely debunked by the facts?

Look it up. And take the red pill.

That is false. There has been lots of prosecution of fraud in Minnesota including by Somalis. When a random YouTuber started accusing places without much evidence this blew up but didn't do anything to help actual investigations of corruptions. It did help Trump push his racist agenda and claim we need to deport Somalis because of actions of a handful of individuals. Which is nonsense not only when one compares it to the massive corruption from the Trump administration but when one realizes most Somalis Americans already have citizenship and a good deal are born in the US

Are you being sincere with this comment? I’m in disbelief you could post this with good faith, but this forum requires me to respond to you with the assumption that you’re posting in good faith.

First of all, the investigation for the fraud had already wrapped up years ago, with many charged. You’re falling for the propaganda that this was ongoing and swept under the rug, as pretense that apparently an occupying force is necessary because Somalians are fraudulent criminals (racist AF), despite the incredible amount of fraud (including Medicare fraud!) within the ruling party at the moment.

Second of all, the ringleader was a white woman who was convicted for this fraud, presumably preying on desperate immigrants, maybe even convincing them that “fraud was the American way”, I mean look at the president - how could fraud not be the American way?

Third of all, that YouTuber has a less than room temperature IQ, and was going around to closed daycares to prove that… they weren’t open? The rightwing grift is so powerful and so lucrative that this absolute imbecile can make it big by giving other imbeciles a justification for their deep-seated racism. Honestly, go listen to interviews with this guy. It’s astounding that anyone trusts any content he puts out, because that’s just what it is - content, not investigative journalism.

Anyway, I guess since some Somalians were involved in fraud we get to occupy cities, tearing anyone brown with an accent away from their family, maybe allowing them to prove citizenship (maybe not), and begin shooting anyone who adds friction to that process (civil disobedience)? That’s the implication of your comment.

Tell me when we can start prosecuting fraud when it’s attached to an (R), by the way.

What amazes me about MAGA is that some claim to like Star Trek.

This is from "Way of the Warrior", when the dominion had managed to con the Klingons into invading Cardassia.

KAYBOK [on viewscreen]: We have orders to search all vessels attempting to leave Bajoran space.

KIRA: Search them for what?

KAYBOK [on viewscreen]: For shape-shifters. Each ship will be scanned, its cargo searched, and its crewmembers and passengers subjected to genetic testing.

SISKO: On whose authority?

KAYBOK [on viewscreen]: On the authority of Gowron and the Klingon High Council.

KIRA: The Klingon High Council has no jurisdiction over ships in Bajoran space.

KAYBOK [on viewscreen]: We assumed you would welcome our assistance.

SISKO: Do you have any evidence that there are changelings aboard this particular ship?

KAYBOK [on viewscreen]: How can we have evidence until we conduct our tests?

KIRA: Commander, Bajoran law strictly prohibits any unwarranted search and seizure of vessels in our territory.

KAYBOK [on viewscreen]: I have my orders.

Compared to

ICE: We have orders to search all people attempting to live in America

Search them for what?

ICE: For illegal immigrants. Each center will be scanned, it's users searched, and their finances and medical history subjected to AI pattern recognition

On whose authority?

ICE: On the authority of Trump and the Federal Government

Trump has no jurisdiction over people in Minnesota

ICE: We assumed you would welcome our assistance.

Do you have any evidence that there are illegal immigrants in this particular learning center?

ICE: How can we have evidence until we conduct our tests?

The Constitution strictly prohibits any unwarranted search and seizure of vessels

ICE: I have my orders.

*Technically this point in the episode it was after the Dominion/Russia interference with the high placed Dominion/Russian asset, but before the Klingons/America invaded Cardassia/Greenland.

If you've ever been inclined to run a "don't tread on me" sticker, it's time to start trading it out for a "tread on me daddy" sticker.

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I didn't talk about deportation itself. I talked about using a sick child as a vector to identify who to deport.

I am not for unrestrained immigration either. But I would not look for whose child is sick so I can kick them out and leave the sick child alone.

It likely wouldn't poll well for elections, but today's ICE does need to be disbanded. Its tasks can be given to other agencies until a replacement can be created and staffed. The recent recruitment drive makes it nearly impossible to reform the agency. There's just too many agents introduced in the poisonous culture and goals.

An easy win that should get widespread approval is bolstering the immigration court system. I have dark worries, but I'm still not entirely sure why this administration is whittling away at immigration courts. You'd think they'd want to process asylum applications faster, so invalid claimants could be deported sooner.

OG classical fascism was pretty incompetent and bumbling at times too.

eventually they got their shit together.

China is a demographic disaster in slow motion and should be keeping anyone they can get who wants to say. The US and EU have avoided much stagnation by importing more bodies, and there is no ethnic component to USA-ian identity compared to being Han and being forced to speak Mandarin.

Thanks. I understand now.

When that happen I will to seriously start considering the US a third world country. A Banana Republic.

I am just an outside onlooker, and things seem pretty bleak.

I thought GP was arguing they were trying to find non-citizens on the voter rolls to intimidate them (which may be a misreading).

Wait times happen at a local level, not federally.

I don't know how they could possibly crank up ID requirements that would get in my way: I have a passport and a REAL ID driver's license.

It doesn't matter whether you can prove it. ICE's current position [0] is that their face scanning app supercedes documents like birth certificates to determine status.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/10/ices-forced-face...

> Are you a citizen, can you prove it at the polling station?

Yes, I have multiple documents proving my citizenship. Never been asked though, ID always sufficed.

> so I think we'll set your vote aside, or possibly prevent it from being cast; we can't be too sure!

I have voted in more than one state (legally, I moved) never seen any voting place asking for any documents except for state ID and voter roll check. I don't think there is any voting place where local state ID is not "legit enough".

Isn’t the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility act going to stop married women who have changes their last name from what was on their birth certificate from voting?

[dead]

While a required literacy test may be a form of voter suppression, it is not "harassment", which is what we are discussing.

Its every branch of the government. The federal government, largely through congressional legislation, has been amassing more and more power for longer than anyone has been alive, while willingly ceding large chunks of that power to the executive branch, while the executive was grooming and shaping the justice department.

Just the abuses of the commerce clause alone should show our government is full of corrupt power mongers.

And it goes down the list too. States taking power from counties, counties taking power from cities, judges, cops, and prosecutors claiming authority over more and more issues despite a lack of sound legal precedence or public approval.

> Rather final ultimate authority needs to be distributed amongst the states. The unrest in Minnesota would be solved in a week if the governor could simply use the National Guard to restore law and order without worrying that the out of control federal executive would just take control of them

We tried that with the Articles of Confederation. Then half the country tried it again 70 years later. It didn’t work out either time.

Trump’s not even close to the worse President we’ve had. He’s just the craziest since television became widespread. FDR who is widely considered one of our best Presidents put nearly 100k US citizens of Japanese descent in interment camps.

Andrew Jackson committed literal genocide.

When was the ideal time for RBG to retire? Was it when Mitch McConnell was refusing to even hold hearings for any Obama nominee in the last years of his presidency? There is no indication that RBG retiring would have resulting in a confirmed Obama selected justice, it could have just resulted in Trump getting his picks earlier.

People do realize that Republicans have agency right? It’s more fun to blame democrats but it’s fairly striking to blame them while hand waving away that the right wing fascist project has been ongoing since at least 2010. They could have also stopped the fascist corruption.

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I've seen a lot of people living in the streets when I lived in California. From my (then) house I could walk at least to a half-dozen places where substantial amount people lived right in the streets. I've never seen people dying in the streets in any state though. Given that only 7 states (and DC) allow Medicaid for illegal immigrants, this must be happening an awful lot. Strangely, I never heard about such cases, let alone a massive number of them. But you evidently did.

I would like to ask you instead of the Word of Jesus - which is surely fascinating, but bears little relevance for the topic at hand - provide some authoritative data as to how many people actually died in the street in those 43 terrible states, for lack of Medicaid coverage, say in the last 5 years? Was it millions? Thousands? Hundreds? How does it compare with the record of California and those living-on-the-street people I am seeing there every time I visit? I think discussing actual data would be better than discussing Jesus.

Oh okay!

What are you quoting? I mean, that sounds like what Stephen miller believes, but who said it?

... a Temu Fredo Corleone with a Nazi haricut ...

Once upon a time this was such a shocking accusation that people just believed it, as who would lie about it?

But when people say this for ten years at the drop of a hat, you have to forgive everyone else for not just automatically believing it any more.

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That’s just not true. There are plenty of people in defense tech that clearly believe they are doing the right thing. Same with those in the military. Their version of “right” is just different than yours. To them, ensuring American hegemony is more right than whatever your definition is.

You would be surprised how pilled some people are. It’s unfortunate.

50% of the US think it's the right thing. Now sure, among educated urban people it was lower, but that's still a large number of people who think it's the right thing, and that executing american citizens for using their constitutional rights is at most "an unfortunate inevitability"

Money, or these IT folks derive pride from the technical challenge of building the tool, whatever its purpose. Or both.

Even Peter Thiel?

Many "libertarians" seem to be far more concerned about the age of consent than the size of the military or police force for some reason.

> you're not an "illegal" when you drive with an expired license are you?

You are. Why do you think licenses have expiration dates? It legally authorises you to perform specific activity within specific timeframe. Any activity without license is illegal.

By same logic you can't stay in the house you legally rented previously.

Surprised those simple concepts need elaboration.

The Sig Sauer P320, which is what Alex Pretti had, is notorious for unintentionally discharging. Various law enforcement agencies and militaries have stopped using it for that reason.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIG_Sauer_P320

Poor training seems plausible, if not likely. But then it's not murder / "extrajudicial killing".

The only person suggesting the gun went off while holstered was the sibling comment by ‘AngryData’. After ICE discoverers the gun and yells “gun! Gun!” the Sig discharges into the ground (visible in some of the videos) before he is shot 3 times.

Phone was in his right hand (our left) and gun was holstered near his other hand. The gun went off into the ground as P320s are known to do when they removed it from him and officers reacted.

[dead]

“Politics” = things that don’t directly affect the (usually highly privileged) speaker.

This.

The government doing bad things is a political topic.

How the government is using technology to do bad things is both a political and technology topic.

Yeah so find a forum that’s for discussing that and discuss it there. Don’t try and force people who are discussing something else to talk about politics with you. Do you also randomly go onto GitHub issues and start talking politics because the people who are talking about repo bugs are “hiding behind a bush” and should talk about the political things you think are important instead?

being neutral on a moving train, etc.

There has always been politics in SV, this is a weird rewriting of history.

Presumably there’s so much pushback now because people are quite uncomfortable having to confront the fact that they may be the bad guys (even though they were probably the bad guys years ago as well).

There is a fun German word capturing this: “Deutungshohheit”

Well said. Even people with a lot in common can and should disagree often. In non-authoritarian systems, politics is supposed to be about managing this disagreement in civil ways. Politics seems unsavory to some, often because they find a lot of political manifestations to be vile or insipid. [1] I get that, but in a way this revulsion is backwards. The alternatives to the sausage-making of politics is usually worse: pretending there is no disagreement, coercion, violence, gaslighting. So when someone says "I don't like politics" I like to say "disagreement is to be expected".

[1] When representatives spend something like 4+ hours a day fundraising, people have good reason to say "this is f-ed up." https://gai.georgetown.edu/an-inside-look-at-congressional-f...

I don't think that's fair. I follow politics closely but prefer HN to stay technical. It shouldn't be offensive.

There are no interesting apolitical topics. Food tastes good sometimes, weather is doing weather stuff, yawn. I feel like we sometimes try to seek conflict out of boredom

Exactly. I'm watching this from the Netherlands. Until last year I always ignored political posts here but now it's become an existential necessity to be involved.

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Okay

Way ahead of you

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You can look at studies like https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/1331677X.2022.20... if you want to look at those multi-causal aspects. In general however, demographics with higher socioeconomic status has lower crime rate and the concept is well established (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7820585/).

A missing aspect with immigration when it comes to statistics is time spent in the country. The likelihood that a person has ever committed a crime in a specific country is generally lower the less time they spend in that country, especially as that number reach zero. The apple to apple comparison would be to look at the average person of average age, in any specific demographic, and ask if they have ever committed a crime, which is not the same as committed a crime in a specific country. That would be the crime rate. An other way would be to ask the question regarding a given year, what is the probability of an individual to commit a crime. The rate of the average person lifetime will not align with the rate of any given year.

The relation between crime and socioeconomic has been thoroughly debated and research when it comes to race, with the finding that race is not related to violent crime, but only once socioeconomic factors (and other related aspects) has been controlled for. If you disregard socioeconomic factors, then race has a distinct relation with violent crime. It is only because researchers control for related factors that we get the findings that we get.

People can disagree with studies should be valid and which doesn't, or look at different meta studies and say which ones is more valid than the others, but I would recommend that one engage with the discussion rather than throw around assumptions about assumptions.

They can't be good little wives like republicans want if they have a career.

> It all comes back to women being treated as full people.

What does this actually mean? Do you mean "get a job instead of having kids?" Working to afford life instead of having kids seem much less humanising, if anything. Being a wife and mum is being a full person, and the main thing that's bad about it is if you are a full-time mum your spouse has to work incredibly hard to compete on the housing ladder against all the two-income families bidding against them.

I think this is an oversimplification. History has shown that as soon as a country is developed enough that children start increasing the family expenses rather than decrease them (I.e. helping out with the farm, or whatever the sustaining family business is, but in developing countries this is overwhelmingly agriculture) the pressure to have children slacks off to a large degree and becomes more of a luxury. So it’s just a byproduct of industrialization.

The US is actually better off with replacement rate than a lot of countries that have industrialized since them because of the way it happened and the wars that were fought. More rapidly-industrializing countries (China, Japan, a few other Asian and SA countries) have way shorter runways despite industrializing much later than the US. And those with one child policies really just made things worse for themselves.

A very large part of what the future is going to look like in my opinion is how different countries are able to grapple with this issue and come up with solutions to the problem of a large aging population and a service, hospitality and medical industry with not enough bodies.

I'd be surprised if the elections of '16 and '24 even register as a blip in demographic data.

Considering the many liberal women who want men who have conservative values (although still agree with them on politics, somehow), yes. Probably yes.

Then doesn't it make more sense for the people who prefer living among a high fertility rate to move to the places where there's a high fertility rate? Why should people who don't have that preference have to endure mass migration when they don't want, didn't ask, and didn't vote for it?

Changing laws is irrelevant if the executive chooses to ignore them.

It would be better to actually enforce the immigration laws we have right now, and see where we land. Then make changes from there.

And we would have had bipartisan steps toward it before the last presidential election, if Trump hadn't told Republicans to tank it at the last minute because it hurt his biggest talking point for reelection.

> Citizens would have to put up with some pretty draconian living conditions to ensure zero illegal migration.

I don’t agree. It’s a matter of incentives. If you know entering the US illegally means you stand a high chance of being deported, have almost no ability to be employed and no access to any social services, the problem mostly solves itself.

Lots of other countries ask why the US has problems other countries have already solved and immigration is a great example of it. It’s a solved problem, our leaders intentionally don’t want it fixed.

> Even Reagan granted mass amnesty in the face of such costs.

The amnesty was an agreement that substantial legislation would be passed later than would stop illegal immigration. That’s why Reagan agreed to it. But the changes never happened.

> But significant change probably requires replacing the Fourth Amendment

The Fourth Amendment can stay as is. Just stop people from staying illegally in the country and the 4th amendment becomes a non-issue.

Immigrants do bring important social and cultural capital. But nobody here is arguing in favor of no immigration.

The standard among countries all over the world is to regulate the flow of immigration via immigration law and deportation of people who violate that law.

How could a massive influx of people happening faster than a system can react not strain the system? I saw this firsthand in schools and hospitals where I grew up, and there are numerous examples throughout history from around the world of the disruption it can cause.

I’m hoping the world grants everyone citizenship to the state of Israel. Most of us are children of Abraham statistically anyway. And, think of all the benefits and economic development.

>Yes, well I don't think we should deport people and I think immigrants improve the US, so I would be in the latter category

Which would put you in the minority (16%).

https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2025/03/26/am...

Even without getting into a debate of whether we should do immigration enforcement at all (a sibling reply goes into it in better detail), there's the practical effect that most people do, and if Democrats don't oblige, people like Trump will get in power instead.