The ICE stuff is extremely unpopular. Most of the people who voted for it did not understand they were doing so. If "the US" is the people, then no, they mostly do not want this. If "the US" is Trump, then yes, it is.
This is also the most important political question in the US right now. Are the people still sovereign?
The issue is that people's idea of illegal immigrants are hardened criminals living a lift of crime, whereas in reality the majority of people that are being deported are normal people that overstayed their visa, ie. the low hanging fruit. So people can be both supportive of the policy but dismayed at the implementation, which is what we are broadly seeing here.
The Harvard-Harris survey linked above asks separately about “deporting immigrants who are here illegally and have committed crimes.” Support for that was at 78% in July.
There was opposition to Noem’s theatrics. But it seems like Mullen’s quieter approach has taken the heat off and most of the focus now is on the shit inflation and Iran war.
Why would anyone be surprised Republicans approve? They voted for it, it was like the main thing they wanted... But despite voting for it still 21% disapprove.
Deporting illegal aliens might be popular as an abstract concept but as soon as the question is about deporting actual people that they know, their opinion changes. It’s great politics to say you’re going to do it, but bad politics and a moral atrocity to _actually_ do it.
The only ethical way to do it is better security at the border and making legal immigration and visits much easier. You can’t just snatch people who are established in communities and put them into camps without leading to a thoroughly justified moral outrage.
I think that it's possible to deport people while still treating them with dignity and respect, without keeping them in horrific conditions, without sending them to random dangerous countries they've never been to, without murdering innocent citizens and non-citizens, and while affording the people you remove legal due process.
Our current president has intentionally created a system designed to be cruel, brutal, and unfair because his supporters get off on it and because every abuse of power makes his next abuse easier, but even though some people will inevitability be upset when the illegal immigrants in their lives are removed from the country, it doesn't have to be a complete moral atrocity to enforce immigration law. The way it's being done today is a choice.
Deporting someone who broke the law is not a moral atrocity. Is it unethical to arrest and jail a bank robber who has established themselves in a community?
These people knowingly and deliberately broke the law, and they continue to deliberately elude enforcement. The problem is that we've been too soft on enforcement, leading to millions upon millions of them assuming they are exempt from the law.
Deporting someone that arrived here 20 years ago, who has a family, whose spouse might be an American citizen, who might have American citizen kids, grandkids, friends, employers, they might own a company and contribute to the economy, etc absolutely is a moral atrocity. Violating border crossing laws is not a crime that is worth upending so many lives. It’s a misdemeanor and the fact that you have to elevate it to a bank robbery to make it seem reasonable tells you everything you need to know. Not all crimes are worth ruining lives over.
I am in favor of deporting people that have not been here long, but there has to be a way to fine people and get them documented after a certain amount of time.
And yet somehow it never predicts, "Wait, back up, three turns ago I said we wanted to do X. You did Y which is the opposite of X," which I write pretty frequently!
Or "I have emphasized repeatedly that you're not to touch vcs and only work in the designated worktree, which you've written down in your memory at least 37 times."
nitpick: I was fully engaged with this article until I hit
> And a bonus point: you skim. Did you notice number 5?
Then I bounced. The best readers skim aggressively. Most text is not worth reading. You skim to identify what is.
But moreover, reading != proofreading. I read every one of the bullets! I did not pay attention to the numbering scheme, because it conveys no meaning. It's a structural affordance for referring to the text, not part of its content.
Or you're just upset for being caught off guard. LLMs have reduced our tolerance and attention span. You're welcome to rant about it but if there's a slim chance of overdose, it doesn't hurt to pause a bit at least. Your choice.
Alternatively, things that are not insightful can feel insightful to some people, because they triggered some different, tangentially related thoughts than what was being communicated — i.e., the reader substituted their own insight for the author's.
Or because the author has enough authority that they are granted a presumption of insightfulness by default, even (or perhaps especially) when the concrete insight that's allegedly being communicated remains unclear.
It really is important to understand the failure modes that the durability model accounts for and what it doesn't. It only accounts for "normal" failures, like an HDD reaching end of life.
For example, you mention Backblaze. Backblaze has public posts about their durability model. They claim to use 17:20 Reed-Solomon erasure encoding. That means there are 20 shards of a blob, and you can lose 3 of them and still reconstruct the blob.
Think about that for a second. If they store 4 shards in a datacenter, that means that a loss of that one datacenter is sufficient to lose the blob, forever. That entails that blobs are sharded across a minimum of 7 data centers, or the loss of one data center might mean permanent data loss. Which one do you think is true? (In fact it's pretty clear from Backblaze's public posts that they don't shard across data centers at all, only across racks within a data center.)
Now, AWS's availability guarantee — not their durability guarantee — entails that they use a less cost-effective erasure coding ratio. S3 is designed so that your blob is available even if a whole AZ goes down, and it's well known that most AWS regions have only 3 AZs. Therefore, if you tolerate the same number of shards lost to HDD failure as Backblaze in your durability model (3), then you might need 17:30 erasure coding to get the same durability and the required availability. That means S3 is storing way more physical bytes than Backblaze — 1.76x the logical size of the blob, instead of Backblaze's 1.18x. That's more expensive, but it also gives you better availability.
Which is also why One Zone S3 is cheaper — if you don't care about the availability guarantee, S3 can do what Backblaze does and save 33% on physical bytes, and they pass on 40–50% of those savings to the customer (this is fairer than it sounds — there's more overhead than physical storage bytes).
But here's the thing. AWS has more redundancy built in than Backblaze because they make availability guarantees in addition to durability guarantees. BUT the durability model is the same, which is why Backblaze can claim equivalent durability to S3. S3 in fact has better durability — they can survive the permanent loss of an AZ without necessarily losing blobs stored there (with the exception of One Zone blobs), and Backblaze cannot. But that's not actually a factor of the durability model, which is just taking into account normal events like HDD failure. Instead, S3 has durability that's more resilient to AZ loss because of their availability model. It's a side effect that isn't actually part of the durability promise!
As far as I'm aware Backblaze stores data only within a single datacenter (for a given region). This likely made sense in their original business model of being "offsite" copy of data.
But it very much breaks down for B2 where they're now storing original data. I hope they rethink this model. You do get what you pay for. There's a reason they're cheap.
Aristotle thought some fish were spontaneously generated and others not (also all eels and Testacea).
"This occurs in ponds, especially one near Knidos, which, so it is said, on one occasion dried up at the time of the Dogstar and all the mud was taken out; water began to collect in it as the first came, and at that point tiny fishes appeared, as soon as the water began. This fish was a kind of grey mullet which is not produced as the result of copulation, and its size was about that of a small sprat: none of them had either egg or milt. (...) This evidence shows that certain fishes are produced spontaneously, and do not come out of eggs or from copulation" (HA VI.15 569a13-19, 25-26).
This is something of a problem for Aristotle, since the formal cause appears to be absent in spontaneous generation. He likely would have been happier to discover that spontaneous generation does not, in fact, occur for animals. But he felt that the evidence forced him to concede that it does.
> On the topic of Michael's comment, I think it's easy for programmers to not notice ads. Almost all programmers I know use an ad blocker and, in real life, their eyes seem to just skim over ads and not notice them.
How do you write this article and not notice that this should be the topmost example of people adapting to buggy software that doesn't at all work for its users without workaround cognitive hacks?
Banner blindness has been studied since a few years after ad banners were invented and advertisers started getting pissy they didn't magically triple their revenue, heh
This is also the most important political question in the US right now. Are the people still sovereign?
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