> ... I'm old ... you can live life without holding a cellphone all the time. It's not as hard as you think.
I'm in my 50s and I don't know where this stance comes from. Sure, you physically can in the same sense that anywhere can be walked to if you're willing to walk long enough. But so many businesses and services have gone "mobile-first" or "mobile-only" to the point that if you're traveling for leisure you're doing extra work on your vacation, and if you're traveling for business you're wasting time that could be used doing your job. Just as a first order, the denizens of every airline subreddit will tell you that the most useful tool during a trip is the airline's mobile app and that's either tied with or just above or below the Flighty app if anything goes wrong.
Combine that with QR codes for everything from menus to parking, public transit tickets and fare cards that can be easily loaded into a phone instead of using a ticket machine made when we were kids, or paper maps increasingly hard to find if they're available at all, and you're looking at a real challenge. How are you going to talk to and plan with your travel partner or colleagues with payphones removed?
It's also not incumbent upon us to make the government's life easier by making our lives harder. "Just leave your phone at home" is ludicrous behavior to expect when it's the government being the intrusive jerks.
Sure it’s inconvenient sometimes, but on the whole I’d say my life is better than those I see glued to their phones.
This belief is reinforced whenever people ask for my number (dentist, doctor, whatever)
The gusto which they invariably reply “OMG I WISH I could get rid of my phone!”
> I can say that we're not exactly a state worrying about water shortages.
Except we are.
> We're probably one of the more reasonable places to build data centers due to cheap green energy and pretty plentiful water.
Most of our water comes from snowpack that melts over the spring and summer. Almost every year for the last several years, snowpack has been abnormal and has affected downstream flows.
> 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.
I'm in my 50s and I don't know where this stance comes from. Sure, you physically can in the same sense that anywhere can be walked to if you're willing to walk long enough. But so many businesses and services have gone "mobile-first" or "mobile-only" to the point that if you're traveling for leisure you're doing extra work on your vacation, and if you're traveling for business you're wasting time that could be used doing your job. Just as a first order, the denizens of every airline subreddit will tell you that the most useful tool during a trip is the airline's mobile app and that's either tied with or just above or below the Flighty app if anything goes wrong.
Combine that with QR codes for everything from menus to parking, public transit tickets and fare cards that can be easily loaded into a phone instead of using a ticket machine made when we were kids, or paper maps increasingly hard to find if they're available at all, and you're looking at a real challenge. How are you going to talk to and plan with your travel partner or colleagues with payphones removed?
It's also not incumbent upon us to make the government's life easier by making our lives harder. "Just leave your phone at home" is ludicrous behavior to expect when it's the government being the intrusive jerks.
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