Blocking law enforcement's vehicles and their person (I saw several protestors put hands on officers), when they are conducting arrests, certainly seems to fit the bill.
I as someone with power over you will repeatedly force you to do an illegal and or immoral act. I have doubt you have the balls to resign rather than follow along, but if you do resign I hope you don't say you were forced out. Be honest.
They were prevented from following just policy, and were being forced to perform actions that go against professional ethics, politically driven prosecutions unconnected from fact or law.
People resigned to send the message to the public: the integrity of the office had been compromised, and the lawyers (lawyers!!) couldn't stay due to their ethics. This is a difficult thing to understand for people that lack ethics.
I mean, carrying a weapon is a 2nd amendment right, but if I bring it to a protest and then start intimidating people with it, the police going after me is not "Government intimidation of the practice of constitutional rights".
Protesting is a constitution right, but if you break the law while protesting, you're fair game for prosecution.
Looking at net support is an odd way to look at the data.
Overall approval of Trump's immigration policy is floating around 50% +/- 5%. That means 1 out of every 2 Americans support it. That seems quite high to me.
> Looking at net support is an odd way to look at the data.
Its a lot more useful as a single number to look at than either “support” or “oppose”, because those don't tell you how much of the excluded amount is on the other side versus undecided.
> Overall approval of Trump's immigration policy is floating around 50% +/- 5%
Overall immigration policy is a different and broader question, but, no, its not.
39% support, with 53% opposed; support hasn't been at or above 45% (the floor of your claimed 50% ± 5%) since the beginning of last summer.
Many Americans understand "Trump's immigration policy" to be "deport murderers, rapists, and drug dealers".
But what's happening now is that Trump pulled a bait and switch -- when he said "deport criminals" the crime he had in mind was that of being an undocumented immigrant, whereas everyone else had in their head when he said criminal he meant "murders, rapist, gangbanger, drug dealers". Not "people going through the asylum process and my roofer".
For a lot of people, they just want to see immigrants come in the "right way", but for the Trump administration they don't want to see any immigrants who are not white.
So when people say they support Trump's immigration policies, you have to really dissect what they mean by that. Which policies? The ones he campaigned on, the ones they wish he campaigned on and are ascribing to him regardless, or the ones actually being implemented?
Legal immigration - as is today - is about 1% of the US population. That's pretty standard, and would result in an slowly increasing population.
But regardless, saying "we need immigrants" then jumping to "illegal or not" is not a logical argument. We absolutely can have a system that prevent illegal immigration, while carefully screening legal immigrants. Heck, every country in the world does this except the US.
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.
Republicans did not support that bill. A single Republican Senator negotiated it in secret. You guys mischaracterize this bill as some amazing thing that everyone was excited to pass until Trump told them not to. That isn't reality.
The US values individual freedom, has porous borders, a diverse population, and a large land mass. Citizens would have to put up with some pretty draconian living conditions to ensure zero illegal migration.
Even Reagan granted mass amnesty in the face of such costs.
We can disagree on where the threshold of unacceptable intrusion into our lives should be. But significant change probably requires replacing the Fourth Amendment. Or--as is happening now--pretending the 4A doesn't exist and hope whoever is in power next won't prosecute them.
> 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.
So you're comfortable with the current situation for citizens?
I.e. one must carry paperwork at all times, risk getting detained and beaten for going out in public (especially if not white or speaking non-English), masked men may enter your property or home with no identification and take whomever they like, no accountability for ICE abuses/mistakes, etc.
What about migrants who are legal? Or tourists who just want to visit on a visa?
Does the US really want a country with no migration nor tourism?
You also seem to think this problem is solved elsewhere, but Europe continues to struggle with surges of migration from conflict zones and poorer countries.
Federal law enforcement (what you call “masked men”) cannot enter your property without a search warrant, nor take whoever they want without a I-200 or I-205 warrant for violating immigration law.
All migrants who are legal MUST carry proof of legal status as it’s the law - 8 U.S.C. § 1304(e). That includes tourists.
It’s not really that hard. Australia has strict enforcement of immigration laws. As does Japan. It’s never perfect but the practically zero enforcement for the past few decades in the US is a horrible situation that only encourages things like human trafficking and labor abuses.
Is that really what we want the US known for? A country where if you can smuggle yourself into at the risk of physical and sexual violence by cartels you might be able to get ahead assuming you can survive the abuse and exploitation of your labor? Immigration laws protect immigrants as much as they protect citizens.
As a non-American, even the US Democratic party is waaaay to the right of my Overton Window. While the US is arguing about if the 2nd Amendment should be restricted in cases like "fully automatic weapons" or "people with felony convictions" etc., I'm from a nation where the police aren't routinely armed and don't want to be, not even with pistols.
This doesn't mean I can't admire NASA, that I have to dismiss the Hoover Dam, that I think every act by Obama or Bush was heinous.
Likewise, I can look at Falcon 9/Heavy, at the progress with Starship, and applaud.
But.
His "Paint is Black" video, and what he claimed about it, was a lie. He himself is pretty awful, and already fits amongst the others you list given the revealed preferences shown by Grok, and by his reactions to criticism of Grok's behaviour.
The bonus-target market-cap of 8 trillion only makes sense with a very optimistic view of the AI Tesla's developing for both FSD and Optimus, and by "very optimistic" I mean "FSD turns them into a monopoly supplier of cars worldwide; or both FSD and Optimus together displace a significant fraction of the US low-skill jobs market while also getting a monopoly on industrial robots and a monopoly on cars in just the USA". It's the kind of thing I expect we'll be putting into history lessons next to Enron and Dutch Tulips, with laws passed to prevent whatever investigators find out to be the key mechanism behind it.
Even with SpaceX, it's impressive, but not because it actually hits Musk's goals, rather because everyone else in space is "over optimistic" about their schedules even harder than Telsa is.
Yes, Harvard and The Lancet are just wildly political.
>Beyond the veracity of those numbers ...
In addition to being incompetent slouches.
Unfortunately, we can multiply any given figure by 0.01 and still get something that amounts to mass murder.
>... it is a political decision whether or not the US should be spending $150B on foreigners or Americans.
A proper political decision wouldn't have involved an abrupt rug pull on a bipartisan program that's been operating for the better part of a century.
There's this thing called continuity that's usually taken very seriously. Especially when hundreds of thousands if not millions of lives are hanging in the balance.
I'm in the market for a car right now, and on paper, a Tesla makes the most sense. I won't be buying one. I'm happy to leave a little utility on the table just to avoid being associated in any way with Musk or his companies. Some might find that "odd", but I really don't care. I don't want to look down at my steering wheel and see the Tesla logo and have to justify to myself why it's OK that I gave my hard-earned money to someone who is actively working to destroy things I hold dear.
GP dislikes Must because s/he felt Musk duped them. What does that have to do with ad hominem? There's no objective argument to dislike; GP dislikes the way the objective arguments were put forth.
And the point of the purity test isn't to establish guilt. You're already declared guilty and the purity test is an attempt at finding or creating evidence of your guilt.
As I recall, the original Bondi blue iMac was the best selling model of personal computer at the time. This wasn't because Apple suddenly stopped being the Betamax of the home computer world, it's because there was only one model when everyone else had a full range, and the effect disappeared the moment they came out in multiple colours.
Same deal with Tesla: They have two core models (Y top, 3 next, all else a rounding error), while everyone else has a full range that sales are split across.
If I want to buy a four-door Toyota sedan, I could buy a Prius, Corolla, Camry, Crown, or Mirai (not even counting Lexus or Century models), diluting each model's car sales, while overall vastly outselling Tesla. Ditto for cross-overs, SUVs, etc.
As a scientist, the two links you provided are severely lacking in utility.
The first developed a model to calculate protein function based on DNA sequence - yet provides no results of testing of the model. Until it does, it’s no better than the hundreds of predictive models thrown on the trash heap of science.
The second tested a models “ability to predict neuroscience results” (which reads really oddly). How did they test it? Pitted humans against LLMs in determining which published abstracts were correct.
Well yeah? That’s exactly what LLMs are good at - predicting language. But science is not advanced by predicting which abstracts of known science are correct.
It reminds me of my days in working with computational chemists - we had an x-ray structure of the molecule bound to the target. You can’t get much better than that at hard, objective data.
“Oh yeah, if you just add a methyl group here you’ll improve binding by an order of magnitude”.
So we went back to the lab, spent a week synthesizing the molecule, sent it to the biologists for a binding study. And the new molecule was 50% worse at binding.
And that’s not to blame the computation chemist. Biology is really damn hard. Scientists are constantly being surprised at results that are contradictory to current knowledge.
Could LLMs be used in the future to help come up with broad hypotheses in new areas? Sure! Are the hypotheses going to prove fruitless most of the time? Yes! But that’s science.
But any claim of a massive leap in scientific productivity (whether LLMs or something else) should be taken with a grain of salt.
I met a guy in the East Bay who escaped Vietnam in 1978. Family sold everything to bribe the government to look the other way.
Boat trip lasted a week - people died, mostly the youngest and oldest, their bodies thrown overboard. Thai pirate came and stole anything of value they had left and raped the women. Boats passed by and did nothing.
They finally make it to Malaysia and spent almost a year in a refugee camp before coming to the US.
Now multiply that story by 2,000,000 with 200,000-400,000 dying along the way. A total of 4-5% of the entire population tried to escape by boat. The lucky ones fled before 1975, some later one.
A massive human tragedy that few people know much about.
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