> A birth certificate is just a piece of paper so that's a bit of a red herring.
No, it isn't. Birth certificates are how we have proven citizenship in the United States almost since the founding of the Republic.
> ...an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship—including a birth certificate—if the app says the person is an alien...
What law gives ICE permission to ignore a document created through the authority of a co-sovereign government of our federal system? Responsibility for recording of births and deaths falls to the several States. If my state has issued a birth certificate documenting the fact of my birth, that is it per the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.
ICE is not a court; they do not make determinations of law. If I have a birth certificate or, even more arguably, a passport then that beats whatever cooked up bullshit ICE is spewing from a mobile device. ICE is not a prosecutor; they do not decide who has faked documents or who has real ones.
People need to stop apologizing for ICE vastly overstepping what they are permitted to do in their haste to become an internal secret police.
> Birth certificates are how we have proven citizenship in the United States almost since the founding of the Republic.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, not everyone had a birth certificate: between one-half and three-quarters of births in the United States went unregistered.[1]
Yeah, it's amazing how many people are so eager to ignore things like "probable cause" and "protection from unreasonable search and seizure."
ICE is 100% going around with the fucking skin color card from family guy and harassing anyone darker than tan. I hope to god that people start pushing back - I saw a video of them doing exactly this to some high school kids and it made my blood boil.
All travelers do but all border inspection people do not. Or if they do, they apply their discretion very unevenly in some Very Interesting Ways.
I've watched it happen twice since COVID, both times traveling abroad for work and coming back into the United States with coworkers (different coworkers each trip) who are not nearly as pale as I am. Neither of us had Global Entry or anything like that back then. Both times, I got waved through with barely a glance and my US-passport-holding coworker got grilled. "Where do you live", "why did you go on this trip", "who do you work for", and so on.
To reiterate: All of us are citizens, all of us were born here, and we were taking the exact same trips at the exact same times coming back with the usual things you take with you on a business trip.
Anecdotes from friends who are darker than a sheet of printer paper tell me this situation has not improved.
Ars is reporting on a legal case and also on people who say they will be harmed by that case. The reporter then goes on to detail the policy work that groups are doing to try to change copyright laws in the country.
What else would you like to see? A legal analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the case?
I hate intrusive ads as much as the next guy, but denying that ads have benefits and people overwhelmingly choose ad-supported services over paid ones is simply sticking your head in the sand.
Saying people overwhelmingly choose ads is conceptualizing things wrong. Take this blog: it just copied a BI snippet about a study some other party did. No one even linked to the original study.
People correctly value this at $0. This post is noise, and things like it just make web crawling/search harder to scale.
My niece was born deaf and her parents went the opposite direction: they chose not to have her get an implant because of the risk of surgery at such a young age and being fortunate to live in an area with a sizable deaf community. They took ASL classes (my spouse and I joined them) and she’s now enrolled in a mix of ASL and English interpreted classes.
I agree that people can only make the decision with what they have at the time. After watching her grow up these last several years, her parents think they made the right choice.
> And communicating specialized stuff like technical programming is not possible, gestures only cover basic words.
I want to gently push back on this. While sign languages do have signs for common, “basic” words (ASL has a lot of 1:1 mapped signs for English), sign languages are languages. They can, and do, express “specialized stuff”.
I have two coworkers who are deaf and they absolutely communicate specialized medical and technical concepts to each other and other people who use sign language. It’s amazing to watch them sign to each other, as someone who is only intermediate at ASL.
> If the law is vague, it is the duty of the judiciary to call that out and of the legislature to rewrite the law to be more precise.
Why? Nothing in our Constitution requires precise laws. Arguably (and since I'm making it, I'll say I'm in favor of this argument), the Constitution would preclude overly strict laws because the Executive is a co-equal branch of government.
> Vague laws are not an excuse for executive agencies to go ham, and I applaud the judiciary for reining in executive abuse of power.
Why not?
Congress has the authority to pass the laws it sees fit. Why is it suddenly a problem that Congress passed a law that says "the agency known as the Federal Trade Commission is established and the President, through a set of commissioners appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, shall ensure that the these list of goals are accomplished and shall establish such rules as the Commission deems appropriate."
We aren't a parliamentary system. The Congress has the power of the purse and the power to enact laws. The President has the power to implement the laws and to spend the money.
What's changed in recent years is the judiciary has come along and decided that a hundred years of Congress writing laws with bullet-point goals and the President acting under those laws is no longer relevant because "Congress didn't write enough words." That's not how textualism works.
>Why? Nothing in our Constitution requires precise laws.
Nothing in the Constitution requires vague laws either.
In the interests of curbing inevitable abuse of executive power, laws should only be as vague as absolutely required. In the interests of wider public comprehension, laws should be as precise as absolutely possible.
If a law is so vague that there are questions if the executive is overstepping its authority, it's the duty of the judiciary to stop that and of the legislature to rewrite the law more precisely.
>The Congress has the power of the purse and the power to enact laws. The President has the power to implement the laws and to spend the money.
And the Judicial Branch has the power to interpret the law, judge the Constitutionality of the law, and check the powers of the Legislature and the Executive.
The judiciary is doing its duty here. Put aside your personal biases and desires, because none of that matters here. Banning non-competes should be enacted by Congress and then executed by the White House withstanding challenges in the Courts.
The Executive Branch does not have the power to interpret the law.
Incidentally, the Executive Branch does not have the power to spend money either; it must spend money according exactly to budgets passed by Congress.
> People's expectations were that pensions would be replaced by 401ks, and retirement could start at 65.
And that's kind of the rub: I don't think people's expectations were that 401k plans would replace pensions; I think employer's expectations were this and the individual worker was sold a false bill of goods.
From what I know (I wasn't economically active when this change happened), the original push for 401k plans came from a desire to lessen the taxable earnings of highly-paid bank executives when we had a much higher top margin tax rate in the United States. As there's also no requirement that employers match employee contributions to 401k--or that matched contributions be available to the employee immediately--employers could almost overnight relieve themselves of the "burden" of pension contributions.
(Not that pensions are, especially today, some magic elixir. Look at how many pensions have had to go to the public assistance well after they were either mismanaged, undercontributed, or both/more by the sponsoring employer.)
Thus we've wound up in this system where, like many things in the US, everyone loses except the people who got there first (or the people who are already very well-resourced).
Generally speaking, with caveats like always exist in life:
If you're roughly 65 or older, you probably held at least one job where you have an employer pension so that plus Social Security means you're probably doing pretty well.
If you're roughly 50 or older and in a union, you have the same thing but with a smaller pension proviso, assuming you weren't able to (and didn't, if you were able to) buy out your pension into a 401k.
People late 40s to 50s are about the age where they lost the benefit of pensions and are fully on the hook for savings if or when they want to stop working but didn't get the full run of having a 401k. They will be looking largely to Social Security and hope.
People in their early 40s to 30s and younger are asking what they're being taxed for and are facing a job market where even more jobs are piecework or lack benefits, alongside massive hikes in the costs of living where there are jobs so saving is even harder.
Yet somehow a US worker is more productive than ever. Those gains are all going somewhere, and it looks like we're all slowly figuring out where...and as a society we don't like it.
(Genuinely curious because I truly don't know in this context) What is a low quality network participant? One of the "bulletproof" hosts?