According to the ACLU, they are not [1]. So Google voluntarily handed over user information. It requires a court order to enforce it and that requires a judge to sign off on it.
This is somewhat analogous to ICE's use of administrative warrants, which really have no legal standing. They certainly don't allow ICE to enter a private abode. You need a judicial warrant for that. That too requires a judge to sign off on it.
"Federal immigration officers are asserting sweeping power to forcibly enter people’s homes without a judge’s warrant, according to an internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo obtained by The Associated Press, marking a sharp reversal of longstanding guidance meant to respect constitutional limits on government searches."
Capitalism. The problem is capitalism. The endless quest for ever-increasing profits just expands wealth inequality. Millennials went through this when the job pipeline died in 2008 (ie entry level positions disappeared). We now have a huge number of people who are laden with debt they’ll never repay and many will never own a home or retire.
Illegal immigration exists to suppress wages of both documented and undocumented people. It’s to increase profits. Certain industries will collapse without it.
And as the global hegemonic superpower, imperialism is the highest form of capitalism. Destabilizing other countries is a tool for exploitation.
Immigration has been the only thing propping up population growth.
I honestly see the US collapsing in our lifetimes. The billionaires will flee. Empires don’t die quietly or quickly however. It’s going to be violent and drawn out.
US law enforcement kill over 1000 people every year, way more than any comparable country [1]. The raw data of incidents on Wikipedia has to be broken down by month [2]. And here's a chart showing the number has been going up basically every year for at least a decade [3].
I'm old enough to remember Waco and there was widespread criticism of Janet Reno's handling of Waco. This idea that the Dems "cheered it on" is ahistorical post facto justification for a position you likely already held.
I see this all the time. It's some combination of "X was hypocrditical" or "X was mean to me", which leads to "and that's why I support [the opposite of X] as [a centrist, a moderate, someone with common sense]". And reaching for a ~30 year old siege is the reachiest of reaches.
This is the Myth of the Moderate. There is no such thing a "moderate" or a "centrist" in the modern day. Ask them about issues and they're just conservatives who are embarrassed about it.
I read a quote once that went something like (paraphrased): every organizational app has to compete with email and every form of social media has to compete with group texts. And I think that's accurate.
If you pick random people they'll have often very old group texts. Family, friend groups, etc. These are used to organize, disseminate news and so on. 10+ years ago, a lot of people did these things on FAcebook. Group texts work on all platforms. They don't have ads. They're chronological.
From an engagement perspective, algorithmic recommendations and ranking (ie the newsfeed) has "succeeded" but it killed the use cases that people now use group texts for. And I think the two are fundamentally incompatible.
The future is solar. This has been clear for years. Solar simply has too many advantages. Plummetting prices, no moving parts, the only form of direct power generation, it can be done anywhere including otherwise unusable land and flexible installation, everything from a window sill to a giant solar farm in the desert.
And of course China is leading this transformation by miles. They're also discovering a whole bunch of secondary benefits too. For example, you need water to clean the solar panels. In desert areas that combination of shade and water has halted or even rolled back desertification. And in places they're feeding livestock on these plants to control their growth.
Orbital data centers make no sense but you know what does make sense? Orbital solar power collectors. I've seen estimates that because of the essentially 24 hour sunlight, no weather and no atmosphere an orbital solar panel can generate around ~7 times the power of a terrestial panel, even factoring in transmission loss from beaming power to the ground. We will reach a point where launch costs are sufficiently low that this will make economic sense.
The popularity of a genre is deeply tied to the historical context of what's going on in the real world. In the 1950s and 1960s you obviously had the Space Race, which itself was a product of the Cold War. Some commments view this as optimism. I disagree. I view it as an expression of patriotism.
I view this patriotism as a crutch in uncertain times. Another example of this is the rise of the superhero genre in the 21st century. Marven was skirting with bankruptcy in the 1990s. A perpetual Spiderman license was sold for a fraction of what it would today. And I think it's no coincidence that the superhero genre ascended post-9/11.
I used to read a lot of fantasy but many years ago I pretty much switched almost entirely to sci-fi. For me the reason was because sci-fi asked questions. I mean there's also space opera and it scratches the same itch as fantasy (IMNHO) but my personal interest in sci-fi is more in the "what if" category.
That's a very broad category that goes all the way from, say, the Iain M. Banks Culture series, which really poses the question of what an ultra-high tech post-scarcity civilization looks like to something like The Handmaid's Tale (yes, that's sci-fi). We've also had some superb sci-fi on the screen in recent years like Severance, Silo and The Expanse.
For me, fantasy is a far more limited genre. Like I'm trying to read Brandon Sanderson recently and while he's a good writer, it's just not hooking me yet in the same way that, say, Revelation Space did. I think the last fantasy series to really hook me was A Song of Ice and Fire. The first three books are some of the finest books ever written.
But as for the decline of starships, I think that the readership has evolved too. More vintage sci-fi simply projected the era of exploration and colonization onto space and it's become pretty clear how unrealistic that is because of the vast distances involved. You have to remember that popular media in the 1960s expected Moon bases and such in the not-too-distant future. Star Trek was really the last gasp of this and, interestingly, Star Trek is fundamentally socialist, which is noteworthy given that it originated in the Cold War.
Star Wars on the other hand was a tale of the resistance to imperialism. George Lucas has said he modeled the resistance on the North Vietnamese. Cyberpunk came about in the 1980s (eg Neuromancer, Blade Runner) that had nothing to do with starships but they really reflected a societal pessimism. Cyberpunk is inherently xenophobic (ie because of fears of the Japanese).
I wonder if the popularity of fantasy is fundamentally escapist and an expression of helplessness. Think about it: fantasy usually revolves around the outsized impact of individual actions, of a hero or heroine.
I have a long history with the Civ series. I spent a massive amount of time playing Civ1. My next most played was Civ4 and most of that wasn't the base game. It was a mod that had a very loyal fan base: Fall From Heaven 2 [1]. I have tried a couple of times to get all this to work on a modern PC but I think I'm played out on the game and I never quite get it off the gorund. I have a ton of nostalgia for it though.
Civ5 started the whole hex thing, which I was never excited about. Yes, Civ4 had stacks of doom but Civ5 turned into a puzzle of moving units in order because you could only have one per hex.
Anyway, Civ2 and Civ3 never got as much play from me. I'm a little surprised that people had the same enthusiasm. My memory of these 2 was that they just added a bunch of tedium, like I distinctly remember that tile improvement changed to turning farms into supermarkets. It's been a lot of years so I might be misremembering. Maybe I just dind't give them enough time. Or maybe nothing could capture my initial enthusiasm for the novelty that was Civ1.
Anyway, i'm always happy to see projects like this. Games really do live forever. Like people will invent software for free to keep running them (ie emulators).
The Civ series has kinda defied the usual trend to entshittification. I'm really thinking of SimCity here. It's hard to describe how much EA shit the bed with SimCity %, so much so that it basically launched Cities: Skylines, which itself has had issues with the CS2 launch.
Does Civ3 have a massive fanbase compared to Civ1, Civ2 or Civ4? I really don't know.
I love the hex system - adds a lot of tactical depth. Choice of naval vs air vs land focus often comes down to who you're fighting and where. Then you turn around to fight someone else and realize your 20 veteran frigates are near useless despite your new enemy being coastal because all of their cities are tucked away in bays or behind hills...
> Meanwhile I suspect they wouldn't do a damn thing if it turns out that some immigration billionaire outright lied on their paperwork.
We don't have to guess this. We have evidence. Elon Musk is worked illegally in the US [1] and then later obtained a green card then citizenship. He didn't acquire his green card through marriage to a US citizen (where unauthorized work is forgiven).
So if you look at his original I485 (adjustment of status) and N400 (naturalization), you would need to see how he answered the questions about unauthorized work. If he answered yes, he may have been ineligible. If he answered no, then that's a misrepresentation and the government could denaturalize him on the basis that his original green card was improperly granted.
Like the author, I have a lot of personal experience with this. Going through it basically forces you to become an expert in things don't really want to know anything about.
What stuck out to me is that despite obviously being a smart and educated person and having the help of immigration lawyers, the author has made a mistake. Sepcifically this:
> I checked in with our lawyers and was told that the kid couldn't get her certificate of citizenship until she turned 18
When you apply to be naturalized (N400) then your children become US citizens by operation of law as long as they are in your physical custody and are under 18. The "certificate of citizenship" the author is talking about is called Form N600 and it specifically doesn't require the child to be over 18. Go and read the instructions for it [1].
If you know nothing about this, you might be confused because the author says his daughter has a US passport. Isn't that the same thing? No.
This comes up a lot when US citizens adopt children from outside the US. This essentially causes them to become US citizens (there's a whole process) but some parents fail to go through the application and formally recognize their child as a US citizen.
But how does the child travel internationally before any of this happens? There's an allowance for them to get a US passport even though they may not be US citizens. Weird, huh? Some people mistakenly think just having a US passport is proof of US citizenship but it isn't.
So here's my advice to anyone who has a child when they naturalize or adopts a child from overseas: IMMEDIATELY file an N600 for that child so they have proof they are a US citizen. This can be incredibly difficult and costly to reconstruct later when paperwork may have gone missing.
This is somewhat analogous to ICE's use of administrative warrants, which really have no legal standing. They certainly don't allow ICE to enter a private abode. You need a judicial warrant for that. That too requires a judge to sign off on it.
[1]: https://www.aclu.org/documents/know-your-rights-ice-administ...
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