The Trump administration has drafted a new executive order that could actually mean higher wages for both foreign workers and Americans working in Silicon Valley. The Silicon Valley companies, of course, will not be happy if it goes into effect...
Companies like Google and Facebook pay their H-1B workers quite well. Their problem has been that the H-1B visas in recent years have been snapped up by low-paying outsourcing and contracting firms who have spammed the H-1B lottery with applications.
Trump's proposed system gives priority to H-1B visa applications based on salary. This is a big win for Silicon Valley companies, because they pay some of the highest salaries. It's a big loss for the outsourcing and contracting firms.
if they want a flimsy excuse to reject people to match a quota and show that the TSA is "working" by throwing out a large number of "potential terrorists".
Look, we were originally discussing immigration. A few articles above, you then just switched to the TSA for no good reason. Do you even understand the difference between TSA and immigration?
Very strange ones about the TSA "helping people" by looking at the private portions of their social media accounts. I just don't get it.
Well, one of your problems is perhaps that you are confusing immigration and security. Another problem may be that (I believe) you have never actually been a immigrant to the US. Take it from someone who has been: as a legal immigrant to the US, my status was that of a petitioner and guest of the US, not as someone who could demand entry. Entry into the US is not a right, it is a privilege that is granted selectively and discriminatively.
I do not think so. In my opinion it only makes sense if they wish to build up a dossier on each visitor
As far as I can tell, immigration agents have a record of every border crossing and every answer non-citizens have given them in the past, plus numerous other sources of information.
Personally I think the entire low rent bunch should be replaced by the sort of professional airport security that is done in Israel.
You mean the kind of professional airport security that asks for access to private portions of social media profiles and the kind of immigration agents that deny entry to HIV positive visitors? The kind of immigration agents that wave elderly Jewish couples through security, while being hostile to any Arabs or Muslims?
Israeli security officials have also on occasion requested access to travelers’ personal e-mail accounts or other social media accounts as a condition of entry. In such circumstances, travelers should have no expectation of privacy for any data stored on such devices or in their accounts.
Some U.S. citizens of Arab or Muslim heritage have experienced significant difficulties and unequal and hostile treatment at Israel’s borders and checkpoints
We appear to be discussing two totally different things.
The fact that you can't stay on topic isn't my fault. You dragged in some bogus Google-vs-TSA comparison and accused me of "defending the TSA". I'm not "defending the TSA"; I think the policy is stupid, just for different reasons than you do.
I very much doubt that this is intended to be for only those 7 countries where social media use is vanishingly low anyway. That makes zero sense to only apply there.
Well, and your assertion that this is done for the purpose of finding reasons to deny people entry also makes zero sense, for the obvious reason that people simply can create fake social network profiles. The only way the policy makes sense is if you interpret it my way.
Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud owns more stock in Twitter than Jack Dorsey.
In any case, none of this will help Twitter. Let's not kid ourselves, the only thing that makes Twitter even marginally interesting is that people aren't shy to be mean to each other; without that, the platform has nothing.
This is why pro-Trump forces are so interested in assuring that Constitutional protections are interpreted as only applying to US citizens.
Which "Constitutional protection" do you think denying entry to the US to non-citizens from specific countries violates? It doesn't violate due process either under the Fifth or Fourteenth amendments. Nor does it violate the equal protection clause, which only applies to persons within the jurisdictions of states.
This is why pro-Trump forces are so interested in assuring that Constitutional protections are interpreted as only applying to US citizens.
That's not what's happening. The Trump administration has tried to impose a temporary ban on the entry of people from countries that the US has been actively bombing, that don't have functioning governments, and that have been the source of terrorism. It's what the president is authorized to do because it's a rational and reasonable thing to do.
The idea that this is some nefarious slippery-slope plan by Trump to attack the Constitutional rights of citizens is ridiculous for the simple reason that Trump's immigration ban simply isn't in conflict with the US Constitution; after all, his ban is not substantively different from dozens similar bans imposed by previous presidents, including Obama.
If the US government can abuse one set of people, it can abuse anybody.
Yes, as a century of progressivism shows. Clinton explicitly promised to widen those abuses, while Trump promised to end them.
What person in Europe would choose a [US-hosted mail] account when they could get a Euromail account which works just well and includes European-style privacy guarantees?
Well, what threats are you concerned about? If you are concerned about the US government reading your email, you are probably better off hosting in Europe. If you are concerned about European governments reading your email, you are probably better off hosting in the US or Switzerland. No matter where you host, you should be under no illusion that the government of the country where you host your data can easily access your mail.
If you are really concerned about privacy, set up your own server and use encryption. OwnCloud seems to be a good option.
Why are you defending the TSA getting a vast amount more personal information to build up profiles of potentially everyone passing through an airport?
I am not "defending the TSA" at all. I think the TSA should cut this crap, simply ban nationals from countries like Yemen and Somalia from entering the US altogether.
Clearly, though, the conclusions of global warming are not affected by a desire to maintain funding.
And your basis for saying that is what exactly? Can you even list what "the conclusions of global warming" are? How does climate change research conform to the scientific method? Do you know what assumptions went into those conclusions? How often were climate models replicated independently? How could any of those conclusions have been falsified? Do you know the answers to these question?
and there's no reason why a scientist has any less standing than you or me to discuss what should be done about what a scientist has studied.
Well, and then people like me can point out that their political recommendations are probably strongly influenced by their self interest, even if we don't get into all the scientific problems with "the conclusions of global warming".
He wants to destabilize the entire planet and destroy civilization as we know it. This is an exact quote from him:
“Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”
Do you equate "the planet" and "civilization as we know it" with "the state" and "all of today's establishment".
Isn't that what Democrats and progressives keep saying? Don't they keep claiming that the US is in the hands of "the 1%", "an oligarchy", and "the patriarchy"? Are you saying that you want to keep these people in power after all?
He knows that our society is held together by very fragile bonds formed through trust, past promises, monetary policy
You mean like the Democrat's "fragile bonds" and "past promises" to cronies and special interest groups like lawyers, certain billionaires, Wall St, big pharma, etc.? Well, yes.
Wouldn't you prefer our society to be held together by trust and commitments between individuals, businesses, and groups, instead of trust and commitments by corrupt politicians?
This "privacy shield" agreement was stillborn, it will live just as long as it takes to get shut down by the European supreme court
And what would happen in that case? Google, Facebook, and Microsoft cloud services would be forced to stop providing most of their services because they couldn't finance them anymore through advertising. Small European advertisers would lose the ability to target people online by interest and would therefore face bigger barriers to entry. Europeans would lose big time. On top of that, if the EU effectively prohibits US online service providers from operating in Europe, there would doubtlessly be retaliation in areas where the EU has strong exports to the US, such as automobiles.
Trump didn't make any "changes to the privacy act", nor could he if he wanted to.
What they are saying is clear from these paragraphs:
about the executive order that President Trump issues two weeks ago that excludes from privacy protections people who aren’t U.S. citizens or permanent residents.
So, citizens and immigrants are excluded.
Next:
“These Privacy Act exclusions could have a devastating impact on immigrant communities [=people illegally present in the US], and would be inconsistent with the commitments made when the government collected much of this information,” the senators say
I.e., the Obama administration made promises to people illegally present in the US that are not backed by law. And the Trump administration is saying that it does not intend to keep those promises, for the simple reason that they are planning on using information collected from illegals in order to prioritize and deport them.
“This should be considered by Europeans a slap in the face for the Privacy Shield agreement that we entered into last year. This creates a new challenge,” Amie Stepanovich,U.S. policy manager at Access Now, said when the order was announced.
That's a red herring; Privacy Shield is backed by law and an entirely separate issue. Trump isn't trying to go after EU citizens who have shared their information with Google or Microsoft, he is trying to go after people illegally present in the US. If Trump wanted to exclude EU citizens from privacy protections or even visa free travel, he could do that easily, but this EO doesn't do it. In fact, generally speaking, the Trump administration wants more immigration from democratic Western nations and less immigration from other parts of the world, so Europe is pretty much the last place on earth they want to make it hard to immigrate or travel from.
In the letter, the lawmakers ask Kelly whether people...
It's, of course, perfectly legitimate for senators to ask questions of the current administration. But let's not kid ourselves, this inquiry is political posturing, not a serious attempt at clarification, from senators that have little political power left; they are looking for ammunition against Trump. It will be interesting to see how Trump responds. I suspect, as he has done before, Trump will manage to turn these senators into unwitting allies in spreading his message.
The strongest motivation for a climate scientist would be to prove everyone else wrong; the one who did that would become extremely wealthy.
That's how science ought to work, but it doesn't. As Max Planck put it:
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
Overall, these results suggest that outsiders are reluctant to challenge leadership within a field when the star is alive and that a number of barriers may constrain entry even after she is gone. Intellectual, social, and re- source barriers all impede entry, with outsiders only entering subfields that offer a less hostile landscape for the support and acceptance of “foreign” ideas.
Of course, there are tons of historical examples where entire fields have stubbornly stuck to erroneous ideas for decades, and there is a large literature now on widespread errors in the scientific literature.
I imagine there aren't (m)any earth scientists among your circle of friends if you think their career choices are limited to either (potentially) lying about global warming or spraying foam on top of hot liquid.
Well, and they would be sort-of correct: right now, there is some opportunity small numbers of climatologists to move into other, related fields, and it involves a loss of status and a lot of work on their part. But the market doesn't have room for $2 billion worth of climatologists who need to switch research areas/fields. And switching is not an attractive option for people who have achieved success and fame in their field; if your most highly cited papers provide results that the community considers irrelevant or disproven, you're worse off than a fresh graduate.
Of course, a lot of graduate students and scientists overestimate their market value and their abilities, so your failure to understand the impact of funding cuts is not surprising.
Some of the journalists who have received such warnings from Google as recent as two-to-three weeks ago include Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine, Julia Ioffe, who recently started at The Atlantic, Ezra Klein of Vox, and CNN's Brian Stelter.
These people haven't had anything of substance to say for years.
Yup, and you appear to have completely given up your earlier claim that the scientists were prejudiced
I never made a claim that they are "prejudiced", I claimed that they have a strong incentive to reach conclusions that ensured their continued funding, which they obviously have (that's only one of many problems, but the one we happend to talk about).
and are now arguing that the scientific evidence is not sufficient to warrant large-scale intervention. I'm happy with that.
Well, guess what, those climate scientists are not. Even the ones that are fairly honest in their scientific work have no trouble going before Congress and talking the the press, talking about existential threats, and demanding massive funding and massive government spending. That's because those demands are political, not scientific, and even people who are scientifically sound can give their biases free rein when it comes to politics and other issues outside their domain of expertise.
Elon Musk told Gizmodo via Twitter Direct Messages: "Our understanding is that this guy was paid by the UAW to join Tesla and agitate for a union. Frankly, I find this attack to be morally outrageous.
Well, you supported the Democrats big time last election. Did you think they were kidding when they said that they support unions? Or were you hoping to buy special exemptions and become their favorite crony with your massive donations?
At least have the decency to live by the political system and values that you tried to impose on the rest of us. If Ford and GM have to put up with unions and their organizers, what possible reason is there that your companies should be exempt? Unions shouldn't have to fight you to organize at your plants, you should welcome them and encourage them.
But why should users have to use two entirely different programs, one of which has a text-based interface only computer nerds will find palatable?
I think that has to do with a really big company up in Redmond, which made a lot of money with a rip-off of another graphics-only operating system and produced code of dubious modularity and unnecessary bloat and complexity. I think their name starts with "M" or something. Maybe you should go and work for them and fix their software.
Meanwhile, somewhat more innovative companies than that Redmond company have come up with solutions like putting much of the browser and rendering into the cloud or using HTML-rewriting proxies. Well, it was innovative 20 years ago at least. Maybe people at that "M" company haven't heard of it, but the rest of us use this when we need it. (Of course, the rest of us usually can't afford satellite phones anyway; you need some old Microsoft stock options for that.)
Despite the mismanagement of the TSA do you really think screeners can just arbitrarily turn people away without giving a reason to their bosses?
They can give a reason: "This person did not provide sufficient documentation that..."
Put yourself in the shoes of those who are getting their accounts looked at
I was in those shoes, for a couple of decades (that's how long legal immigration often takes in the US), and I have been online all that time. I had zero problem with INS/DHS wanting to look at my online presence, and I made sure that whenever I traveled, my online information matched my real world information, including being listed on my employer's external web page when possible.
because there is a good chance that it may end up being a blanket policy
You already worked out, all by yourself, why that would be unreliable for finding terrorists: people with nefarious motives simply create a harmless looking social media account. Where your logic goes off the rails is that you then infer "therefore DHS is staffed by idiots and the whole thing is a fascist plot hatched by Trump's white nationalists" or something like that.
If you're a technocrat, it's reasonable thing for DHS to try to do in order to maximize the number of people they can safely admit, in particular from failed countries. That is why, as you observed yourself, this crap started during the Obama administration: they wanted to let more people in, as opposed to keeping people out. And I have no doubt that they would ask every traveler for their social media profile because such a system would use machine learning and they would need "labeled training data" for that. They may also catch some careless terrorists in the process and deny some entries based on negative information in social networks, but that's not the point, for the reasons you have already worked out for yourself.
I love the fact that current liberals still have a little bit of the old reflexes where they don't want government looking at private information (I wish they had that more often, say, with financial and medical information, which they blithely want to send to Washington), and I agree: ban the use of social networks for immigration decisions. Where you err is in thinking that banning the use of social networks results in a less restrictive admission policy, instead of a more restrictive one. Without non-governmental information sources, almost nobody from places like Yemen or Somalia can be admitted.
That's not really the reason. IMHO they would be looking for the equivalent of the "drunken pirate" costume party Facebook post that resulted in a teacher being sacked - something that makes the poster look bad is an excuse to block someone at an airport and thus show that the TSA is doing something.
I'm sorry, but you still just aren't getting it. Contrary to the recent Democratic delusions, they don't need "excuses" to deny anyone entry, they can just deny it.
Also there are a vast number of countries "without adequate record keeping". Even heavily developed countries have a non-trivial number of people that fell through the documentation cracks until the 1970s and a few afterwards.
Well, and those people are also denied entry, no matter where they are from.
Perhaps you should consider that while you are arguing about an increasingly irrelevant suspended executive order
The executive order will be reinstated.
some others here are discussing this issue of the TSA looking at social media in a broader context that has been in the press for around a year at least.
Well, and I am making the same kinds of comments now as I did a year ago, because obviously a lot of people still don't understand what the point of checking social networks is.
Of course, I'm happy if people oppose the use of social networks in visa processing for any reason, because eliminating it ends up making the criteria for admission more strict.
The day after his party killed the one federal agency tasked with ensuring voting machine security.
Your attempt to change the subject of course means that you recognize my analysis as sound; thanks for confirming that.
As for the Election Assistance Commission, I suggest we discuss that some other time; perhaps someone will post an article on Slashdot that will give you a chance to read up on the facts, as opposed to just repeating talking points of your ideological masters.
Monsters and the monsters that defend them.
Oh, don't flatter yourself. You're no "monster". Like most of the footsoldiers for totalitarianism that I have had the misfortune to encounter, I expect that you're kind of a wimp and a dweeb.
Aren't they required to conduct all government business on government systems?
Government business, not party business.
Didn't Hilary got a whole lot of crap (and lose an election) over this?
Hillary "got a whole lot of crap" for a couple of things.
(1) She tried to circumvent public record keeping requirements by using a private E-mail server for government business.
(2) She received classified documents on her private E-mail server, shared the documents with unauthorized people, and was responsible for exposing those documents to hostile governments.
(3) She destroyed evidence.
(4) Hillary also used private E-mail for party business, which is legal. What got her in trouble there was that her security was poor, that her mail got leaked as a result, and that it contained lots of politically embarrassing and damaging information.
There is no evidence that Trump or the GOP are doing any of this. Furthermore, the only possible use of an app like Confide would be for purpose (1), but that is something government officials can already achieve simply by making a phone call or meeting in person.
Fortunately, AGW is quite real and quite settled science so no there isn't any need for science to keep saying it is.
Indeed it is: we know with a high degree of certainty there is going to be gradual warming and sea level rise over the next century, somewhere between the low and high emission scenarios. Hence we also don't need a lot of federal funding for climate scientists anymore: people know what's coming and can prepare for it.
There is still some science to be done in biology, ecology, economics, and social sciences, but the climate science is, as you say, settled and has little more to contribute.
Bye now.
Be seeing you. Enjoy the unveiling of the Trump administration's budget.
Slashdot Mirror
Companies like Google and Facebook pay their H-1B workers quite well. Their problem has been that the H-1B visas in recent years have been snapped up by low-paying outsourcing and contracting firms who have spammed the H-1B lottery with applications.
Trump's proposed system gives priority to H-1B visa applications based on salary. This is a big win for Silicon Valley companies, because they pay some of the highest salaries. It's a big loss for the outsourcing and contracting firms.
Look, we were originally discussing immigration. A few articles above, you then just switched to the TSA for no good reason. Do you even understand the difference between TSA and immigration?
Well, one of your problems is perhaps that you are confusing immigration and security. Another problem may be that (I believe) you have never actually been a immigrant to the US. Take it from someone who has been: as a legal immigrant to the US, my status was that of a petitioner and guest of the US, not as someone who could demand entry. Entry into the US is not a right, it is a privilege that is granted selectively and discriminatively.
As far as I can tell, immigration agents have a record of every border crossing and every answer non-citizens have given them in the past, plus numerous other sources of information.
You mean the kind of professional airport security that asks for access to private portions of social media profiles and the kind of immigration agents that deny entry to HIV positive visitors? The kind of immigration agents that wave elderly Jewish couples through security, while being hostile to any Arabs or Muslims?
Israeli security officials have also on occasion requested access to travelers’ personal e-mail accounts or other social media accounts as a condition of entry. In such circumstances, travelers should have no expectation of privacy for any data stored on such devices or in their accounts.
Some U.S. citizens of Arab or Muslim heritage have experienced significant difficulties and unequal and hostile treatment at Israel’s borders and checkpoints
https://travel.state.gov/conte...
The fact that you can't stay on topic isn't my fault. You dragged in some bogus Google-vs-TSA comparison and accused me of "defending the TSA". I'm not "defending the TSA"; I think the policy is stupid, just for different reasons than you do.
Well, and your assertion that this is done for the purpose of finding reasons to deny people entry also makes zero sense, for the obvious reason that people simply can create fake social network profiles. The only way the policy makes sense is if you interpret it my way.
Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud owns more stock in Twitter than Jack Dorsey.
In any case, none of this will help Twitter. Let's not kid ourselves, the only thing that makes Twitter even marginally interesting is that people aren't shy to be mean to each other; without that, the platform has nothing.
No, the solution is obvious: deport people illegally present in our country. You know, just like other civilized countries do.
Which "Constitutional protection" do you think denying entry to the US to non-citizens from specific countries violates? It doesn't violate due process either under the Fifth or Fourteenth amendments. Nor does it violate the equal protection clause, which only applies to persons within the jurisdictions of states.
That's not what's happening. The Trump administration has tried to impose a temporary ban on the entry of people from countries that the US has been actively bombing, that don't have functioning governments, and that have been the source of terrorism. It's what the president is authorized to do because it's a rational and reasonable thing to do.
The idea that this is some nefarious slippery-slope plan by Trump to attack the Constitutional rights of citizens is ridiculous for the simple reason that Trump's immigration ban simply isn't in conflict with the US Constitution; after all, his ban is not substantively different from dozens similar bans imposed by previous presidents, including Obama.
Yes, as a century of progressivism shows. Clinton explicitly promised to widen those abuses, while Trump promised to end them.
Well, what threats are you concerned about? If you are concerned about the US government reading your email, you are probably better off hosting in Europe. If you are concerned about European governments reading your email, you are probably better off hosting in the US or Switzerland. No matter where you host, you should be under no illusion that the government of the country where you host your data can easily access your mail.
If you are really concerned about privacy, set up your own server and use encryption. OwnCloud seems to be a good option.
I am not "defending the TSA" at all. I think the TSA should cut this crap, simply ban nationals from countries like Yemen and Somalia from entering the US altogether.
And your basis for saying that is what exactly? Can you even list what "the conclusions of global warming" are? How does climate change research conform to the scientific method? Do you know what assumptions went into those conclusions? How often were climate models replicated independently? How could any of those conclusions have been falsified? Do you know the answers to these question?
Well, and then people like me can point out that their political recommendations are probably strongly influenced by their self interest, even if we don't get into all the scientific problems with "the conclusions of global warming".
Do you equate "the planet" and "civilization as we know it" with "the state" and "all of today's establishment".
Isn't that what Democrats and progressives keep saying? Don't they keep claiming that the US is in the hands of "the 1%", "an oligarchy", and "the patriarchy"? Are you saying that you want to keep these people in power after all?
You mean like the Democrat's "fragile bonds" and "past promises" to cronies and special interest groups like lawyers, certain billionaires, Wall St, big pharma, etc.? Well, yes.
Wouldn't you prefer our society to be held together by trust and commitments between individuals, businesses, and groups, instead of trust and commitments by corrupt politicians?
And what would happen in that case? Google, Facebook, and Microsoft cloud services would be forced to stop providing most of their services because they couldn't finance them anymore through advertising. Small European advertisers would lose the ability to target people online by interest and would therefore face bigger barriers to entry. Europeans would lose big time. On top of that, if the EU effectively prohibits US online service providers from operating in Europe, there would doubtlessly be retaliation in areas where the EU has strong exports to the US, such as automobiles.
This has nothing to do with the EU Privacy Act, it has to do with data collected from and about illegals in the US.
Trump didn't make any "changes to the privacy act", nor could he if he wanted to.
What they are saying is clear from these paragraphs:
So, citizens and immigrants are excluded.
Next:
I.e., the Obama administration made promises to people illegally present in the US that are not backed by law. And the Trump administration is saying that it does not intend to keep those promises, for the simple reason that they are planning on using information collected from illegals in order to prioritize and deport them.
That's a red herring; Privacy Shield is backed by law and an entirely separate issue. Trump isn't trying to go after EU citizens who have shared their information with Google or Microsoft, he is trying to go after people illegally present in the US. If Trump wanted to exclude EU citizens from privacy protections or even visa free travel, he could do that easily, but this EO doesn't do it. In fact, generally speaking, the Trump administration wants more immigration from democratic Western nations and less immigration from other parts of the world, so Europe is pretty much the last place on earth they want to make it hard to immigrate or travel from.
It's, of course, perfectly legitimate for senators to ask questions of the current administration. But let's not kid ourselves, this inquiry is political posturing, not a serious attempt at clarification, from senators that have little political power left; they are looking for ammunition against Trump. It will be interesting to see how Trump responds. I suspect, as he has done before, Trump will manage to turn these senators into unwitting allies in spreading his message.
That's how science ought to work, but it doesn't. As Max Planck put it:
And that view is supported by research, e.g.:
Of course, there are tons of historical examples where entire fields have stubbornly stuck to erroneous ideas for decades, and there is a large literature now on widespread errors in the scientific literature.
Well, and they would be sort-of correct: right now, there is some opportunity small numbers of climatologists to move into other, related fields, and it involves a loss of status and a lot of work on their part. But the market doesn't have room for $2 billion worth of climatologists who need to switch research areas/fields. And switching is not an attractive option for people who have achieved success and fame in their field; if your most highly cited papers provide results that the community considers irrelevant or disproven, you're worse off than a fresh graduate.
Of course, a lot of graduate students and scientists overestimate their market value and their abilities, so your failure to understand the impact of funding cuts is not surprising.
These people haven't had anything of substance to say for years.
I never made a claim that they are "prejudiced", I claimed that they have a strong incentive to reach conclusions that ensured their continued funding, which they obviously have (that's only one of many problems, but the one we happend to talk about).
Well, guess what, those climate scientists are not. Even the ones that are fairly honest in their scientific work have no trouble going before Congress and talking the the press, talking about existential threats, and demanding massive funding and massive government spending. That's because those demands are political, not scientific, and even people who are scientifically sound can give their biases free rein when it comes to politics and other issues outside their domain of expertise.
Well, look, it's obvious that you are going to cling to this delusion no matter what I say.
You keep proving that you are stupid, for example by failing to make a single coherent argument.
Well, it presumably takes a few years to build the kind of social network and connections that you need in order to rally workers around your cause.
He isn't a "shill"; a "shill" means something very different.
He may well have joined the company with the intent of organizing a union, and there is nothing wrong with that.
Well, you supported the Democrats big time last election. Did you think they were kidding when they said that they support unions? Or were you hoping to buy special exemptions and become their favorite crony with your massive donations?
At least have the decency to live by the political system and values that you tried to impose on the rest of us. If Ford and GM have to put up with unions and their organizers, what possible reason is there that your companies should be exempt? Unions shouldn't have to fight you to organize at your plants, you should welcome them and encourage them.
I think that has to do with a really big company up in Redmond, which made a lot of money with a rip-off of another graphics-only operating system and produced code of dubious modularity and unnecessary bloat and complexity. I think their name starts with "M" or something. Maybe you should go and work for them and fix their software.
Meanwhile, somewhat more innovative companies than that Redmond company have come up with solutions like putting much of the browser and rendering into the cloud or using HTML-rewriting proxies. Well, it was innovative 20 years ago at least. Maybe people at that "M" company haven't heard of it, but the rest of us use this when we need it. (Of course, the rest of us usually can't afford satellite phones anyway; you need some old Microsoft stock options for that.)
They can give a reason: "This person did not provide sufficient documentation that..."
I was in those shoes, for a couple of decades (that's how long legal immigration often takes in the US), and I have been online all that time. I had zero problem with INS/DHS wanting to look at my online presence, and I made sure that whenever I traveled, my online information matched my real world information, including being listed on my employer's external web page when possible.
You already worked out, all by yourself, why that would be unreliable for finding terrorists: people with nefarious motives simply create a harmless looking social media account. Where your logic goes off the rails is that you then infer "therefore DHS is staffed by idiots and the whole thing is a fascist plot hatched by Trump's white nationalists" or something like that.
If you're a technocrat, it's reasonable thing for DHS to try to do in order to maximize the number of people they can safely admit, in particular from failed countries. That is why, as you observed yourself, this crap started during the Obama administration: they wanted to let more people in, as opposed to keeping people out. And I have no doubt that they would ask every traveler for their social media profile because such a system would use machine learning and they would need "labeled training data" for that. They may also catch some careless terrorists in the process and deny some entries based on negative information in social networks, but that's not the point, for the reasons you have already worked out for yourself.
I love the fact that current liberals still have a little bit of the old reflexes where they don't want government looking at private information (I wish they had that more often, say, with financial and medical information, which they blithely want to send to Washington), and I agree: ban the use of social networks for immigration decisions. Where you err is in thinking that banning the use of social networks results in a less restrictive admission policy, instead of a more restrictive one. Without non-governmental information sources, almost nobody from places like Yemen or Somalia can be admitted.
I'm sorry, but you still just aren't getting it. Contrary to the recent Democratic delusions, they don't need "excuses" to deny anyone entry, they can just deny it.
Well, and those people are also denied entry, no matter where they are from.
The executive order will be reinstated.
Well, and I am making the same kinds of comments now as I did a year ago, because obviously a lot of people still don't understand what the point of checking social networks is.
Of course, I'm happy if people oppose the use of social networks in visa processing for any reason, because eliminating it ends up making the criteria for admission more strict.
Your attempt to change the subject of course means that you recognize my analysis as sound; thanks for confirming that.
As for the Election Assistance Commission, I suggest we discuss that some other time; perhaps someone will post an article on Slashdot that will give you a chance to read up on the facts, as opposed to just repeating talking points of your ideological masters.
Oh, don't flatter yourself. You're no "monster". Like most of the footsoldiers for totalitarianism that I have had the misfortune to encounter, I expect that you're kind of a wimp and a dweeb.
Government business, not party business.
Hillary "got a whole lot of crap" for a couple of things.
(1) She tried to circumvent public record keeping requirements by using a private E-mail server for government business.
(2) She received classified documents on her private E-mail server, shared the documents with unauthorized people, and was responsible for exposing those documents to hostile governments.
(3) She destroyed evidence.
(4) Hillary also used private E-mail for party business, which is legal. What got her in trouble there was that her security was poor, that her mail got leaked as a result, and that it contained lots of politically embarrassing and damaging information.
There is no evidence that Trump or the GOP are doing any of this. Furthermore, the only possible use of an app like Confide would be for purpose (1), but that is something government officials can already achieve simply by making a phone call or meeting in person.
https://yourlogicalfallacyis.c...
It is. We all agree on that.
Indeed it is: we know with a high degree of certainty there is going to be gradual warming and sea level rise over the next century, somewhere between the low and high emission scenarios. Hence we also don't need a lot of federal funding for climate scientists anymore: people know what's coming and can prepare for it.
There is still some science to be done in biology, ecology, economics, and social sciences, but the climate science is, as you say, settled and has little more to contribute.
Be seeing you. Enjoy the unveiling of the Trump administration's budget.