They run it through a machine with a pinch feed system. Works fine for flat pieces of paper, but when you put something rigid through you get wierd forces. Putting the CD inside the manual might paradoxically make things worse - the machine has to apply more force to move a book than an envelope - force with a large downward component. It hits the CD and then... crack.
IIRC netflix doesn't get a volume discount, they may even pay a premium for hand sorting of their mail. I think the calculation was that it's cheaper to pay the USPS to hand sort DVDs shipped in paper than spend the money on packaging that can handle the standard automated process.
It depends on what you see the purpose of the university system as. If, like a movie theater Universities exist solely sell a product, then no, it's not the university's job to make kids go to class. (and while they are adults legally, most are kids emotionally.)
If the university system has a responsibility to communities (who often fund them with public money), then maybe they ought to be trying new ways to better educated the students they're entrusted with.
When I went to college I was well prepared academically, due mostly to my excellent high school education. I was never in any danger of failing any of my classes. Socially - well lets just say I was well acquainted with the RAs and the Resident manager. Many of my class and dorm mates didn't have my academic strengths to get them through their first year. I'm convinced that had they made it through the first year, many of those people would have settled down and been productive students. Attendance for credit may have done the trick for some of them.
I concede that I don't know anything about the university system in Portugal. I'd be willing to place a fairly large bet that this is not what's happening at Northern Arizona University.
There's something to be said for easing people into something. Most college freshman have spent their entire academic lives in mandatory attendance settings, many haven't experienced any meaningful independence before moving into the alcohol riddled sex party that is the dorm at a state university.
Think about the people who drop out after the first year, they generally fall into a few broad categories. Partied too much. Woefully unprepared in high school. Can't afford it.
Mandatory attendance won't solve all the problems, if you can convince the budding alcoholic that maybe he really ought to get up for his 9:00 am class on Wednesday morning, he might learn something. If you can get the kid who can't multiply to show up to his math classes and talk to the TAs, instead of panicking trying to teach himself (because the teachers don't make sense) perhaps they can get him into the right class.
Basically, a poor class and semester planning by the teachers overloads the students so badly that they don't even have time to pee, let alone to themselves and to do homework.
I hardly think that's the problem.
In college you schedule your own classes. If you overburdened yourself, that's your problem. If you're trying to support a family (and this is very much an exception) perhaps you should be attending part time.
The reason people don't go to class is (a) they know the material and don't feel compelled to go or (b) they don't want to (usually because they're hung-over).
I stressed about exams occasionally as an undergrad too, but neither I nor any of my friends were ever in a position where we couldn't go to class because we had too much studying to do. Actual classroom time was usually ~30 hours/week.
Part of the larger point is that large taxpayer subsidized public universities tend to have a hard time with freshman retention. There a numerous reasons for this ranging from emotional maturity to being unprepared for higher education to irresponsible use of new found independence. Mandatory attendance might not solve all these problems, but they might solve some of them. If state schools exist at least partially to improve the community, they might be doing the community (especially poor and minority communities) a favor by making their barely adult students attend class for their first year.
The trick is making attendance mandatory for the right classes. Is Chem 121 a large lecture style weed-out course for technical majors? Don't make it mandatory, you'll frustrate the bright kids who don't need to be there and fail to weed out people who are unprepared for a rigorous program. Is Math 101 a small group remedial algebra class? Make attendance mandatory and make it count towards your grade.
Incidentally, I suspect this RFID program gets it exactly backwards.
BP had $8.4 billion cash on hand at the end of 2009 and they made $4.3 billion in profits in 4Q2009. The estimated clean up costs right now are on the order of $14 billion (that's a ROM). They're not going bankrupt, so if they balk at paying one red cent for clean up the federal government ought to seize every one of their assets in this county to recoup the costs.
That's the cap on liability not clean up. Meaning if they decimate a 10 billion dollar fishing industry, they only have to pay $75 million to that industry.
They're still on the hook for the full clean-up costs (more or less...).
Let me add two thing. First, Social Security, like all altruistic acts pays dividends. We're social creatures for a reason - it's good for the group.
If you're my neighbor and you make a poor decision (like getting injured on the job or having the poor taste to develop multiple sclerosis) and it wipes you out financially, it's better for me if society can get you back on your feet. Otherwise, the bank forecloses on your house and you die in the gutter with your shopping cart in front of my house - and that can have negative effects on the neighborhood's property values.
Second, 90% of people thing they're better than average drivers. Somehow I bet the same is true for contingency planning.
You see, the cop already has to have a reason to be dealing with the person and in the law you cited, the cp[ has to believe that a crime has, is, or is about to be committed by the person. So if anything, the cop can arrest the person on suspicion of the crime in which case further steps to identify Juan can be taken too.
The cop has to have a reason to be dealing with the person, but "any lawful contact" extends beyond Terry stops to interviewing witnesses or canvassing neighborhoods.
To review: to detain someone you need a "reasonable suspicion." to arrest someone you need "probable cause to believe that a crime has been committed." to ask someone about their immigration status you need "lawful contact."
to ask someone their name you need to have detained them. to collect identifying information you need to arrest them or file a 3905, which requires, a "Reasonable cause for belief that a felony has been committed." to demand immigration papers you need ???
It's fine and good to require a cop to ask a question, but this law doesn't specify what happens if the cop doesn't get an answer. In reality, if you tell a cop to ask a question, he's going to assume that whoever he asks has to answer. And that's where, as far as I'm concerned, this law falls down.
I guess not answering a direct question like were do you live or something in order to settle the question of if he was the same Juan Gonzales that is wanted, that in and of itself would be an act Juan took that created the arrest situation.
Maybe, but requiring someone to answer questions or face arrest appears to be a violation of our fourth and fifth amendment rights.
The law clearly limits what can and can't be done to what is already legal and illegal for the feds to do.
Sort of. The problem is, first, that the FEDs responsible for enforcing immigration laws have a narrow scope of interaction with the public. Just as it's a bad idea to have the guy who's investigating a burglary in your house to collect your taxes, it's (IMHO) a bad idea to have the same people investigating bodega robberies enforcing immigration laws. Second, it's also not clear that the states are allowed to tell the FEDs, "you're not doing your job, so we're going to do it for you."
Agreed. Regarding Kobach and motives - You described him as a law professor, and I was attempting to point out that he's not some legal scholar drafting legislation from the Ivory Tower. He's a political operative who happens to teach law. Not that there's anything wrong with that as long as there's full disclosure.
Like you said, he can't make something a law by fiat so he's hardly solely to blame - I'm just not going to take his word for it that "legal contact" was intended to be narrowly interpreted when everything else he's done has been designed to make life for Mexicans as difficult as possible.
If that's what he meant when drafting the law, that's what he should have said. The law would have been considerably less onerous if instead of "any lawful contact" the drafters had substituted, "any suspect under police detention of arrest."
I think Kobach's motives are far from pure. He isn't just a law professor, he has a well known agenda. He's worked with Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which has received considerable funding from the Pioneer fund, which "has it's roots in Darwinian-Galtonian evolutionary tradition, and the eugenics movement." Now that's a whole lot of crazy packed into one sentence.
I'm not so worried about the overloaded car where no one has ID. You get the driver for failure to provide a driver's license and the passengers for seat belt violations. I'm more worried about the car with 4 guys in it in the Home Depot parking lot. You've got no reason to ask anyone other than the driver for anything other than their names.
I'm fairly convinced that the way this law is written police are required to inquire as to the immigration status of witnesses if they say something that gives them reasonable cause to believe that they're here illegally, provided it doesn't interfere with the investigation i.e. after you've determined they don't have any good information for you. That to me is very troubling - so much for community policing.
This gets real messy real fast. In order to procure identifying information we've introduced a third standard of evidence, "Reasonable cause for belief that a felony has been committed". I *think* reasonable cause is less than probable cause but more than reasonable suspicion (though I very well could be mistaken) but I also believe that being in this country illegally is not a felony.
If a cop runs the name Juan Gonzalez, and finds one out of thirty with an outstanding warrant and arrests him can he reasonably state he's acting "in good faith"? I'd say no, but I could also see a judge disagreeing.
I'll also note that according your link you can only detain someone for three hours to obtain identifying information. I'm not sure it's possible to go from Terry stop to judicial order to fingerprint collection in that time. And once you've got the info you still have to analyze it - and by then Juan is definitely in the wind.
It is my opinion that this law is a poorly thought out disaster. The irony is that if they had restrained themselves to ascertaining the immigration status of people arrested or detained in a traffic stop it would have accomplished 90% of what they wanted and might actually have stood up to a court challenge. Instead they had to go for he gold and add the "any lawful contact" provision BS.
then he can ask for some additional information like your address or license number or SS number or whatever to distinguish between you and the 200 other Juan Gonzales' that live in the same city.
However, it's clear in AZ (from the first law I linked) that Juan doesn't have to answer those questions. A LEO only needs reasonable suspicion to detain someone, but they need probable cause to arrest. I don't think refusal to answer questions you're not legally obligated to answer can count towards probable cause. I agree that the police are well within their rights to detain him - I think they have a law suit on their hands if they arrest him (and he turns out to be a citizen).
Based on my non-expert reading Hiibel you are only required to cooperate with the police within very narrow bounds, and that non-cooperation is not grounds for suspicion based on the 4th and 5th amendments. I think that providing proof of citizenship is beyond those bounds, but I also don't think it's 100% clear-cut. I will however note that the the dissenting opinions in Hiibel argue that the majority decision is too conservative.
Either way, I expect this law to be challenged in court in short order.
"lawful contact" is ridiculously broad, it's basically anything short of a cop breaking into your house.
If I were looking for a test case for this law, I'd be spreading the word far and wide in AZ that if you're a citizen and a cop asks about your immigration status to refuse to answer - at least until you've been arrested.
Ok, so the new law requires LEOs to ask about the citizenship status of anyone they "reasonably suspect" to be an illegal immigrant. What's not clear to me is whether failure to produce satisfactory documentation should result in giving the officer probable cause to believe that "The person to be arrested has committed any public offense that makes the person removable from the United States." I think this runs afoul of Hiibel and Arizona's own stop and identify law.
Other identifiers that Arizona law specifically states you are not required to give.
A person detained under this section shall state the person's true full name, but shall not be compelled to answer any other inquiry of a peace officer.
It's true that the dems are bleeding supporters, but they're mostly independents that moved into the (d) column when Obama ran. It's important to realize that the democrats loss isn't necessarily the republicans gain. The GOP is tacking HARD right, and while they will almost certainly pick up seats in the midterms, their long term strategy is questionable. People who might stand a chance against Obama in 2012 like Crist and Pawlenty are being purity-tested out of the party and others like McCain and Romney are tripping over themselves getting to the Michele Bachman tea party wing.
That data is from 2003, which was before the drug violence really heated up in Mexico. If border violence were a problem in El Paso you'd expect the situation to have deteriorated considerably. What has actually happened is that there's been year over year decreases in crime in El Paso.
And if people in El Paso think it's dangerous that's because they're either delusional, or not paying attention. Which, I agree is relevant and might be why AZ passed the law it did. But what it illustrates is that lawmakers should be responsible and not pass laws based on counter-factual fear-mongering nonsense, perhaps they should take their public position seriously and attempt to educate Beck and Dobb's listeners instead of pandering to them.
There is a war going on in Mexico, I don't dispute that. But it's not having an effect on cities on the US side of the border.
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Doesn't media mail take eons to be delivered?
best guess:
They run it through a machine with a pinch feed system. Works fine for flat pieces of paper, but when you put something rigid through you get wierd forces. Putting the CD inside the manual might paradoxically make things worse - the machine has to apply more force to move a book than an envelope - force with a large downward component. It hits the CD and then ... crack.
IIRC netflix doesn't get a volume discount, they may even pay a premium for hand sorting of their mail. I think the calculation was that it's cheaper to pay the USPS to hand sort DVDs shipped in paper than spend the money on packaging that can handle the standard automated process.
It depends on what you see the purpose of the university system as. If, like a movie theater Universities exist solely sell a product, then no, it's not the university's job to make kids go to class. (and while they are adults legally, most are kids emotionally.)
If the university system has a responsibility to communities (who often fund them with public money), then maybe they ought to be trying new ways to better educated the students they're entrusted with.
When I went to college I was well prepared academically, due mostly to my excellent high school education. I was never in any danger of failing any of my classes. Socially - well lets just say I was well acquainted with the RAs and the Resident manager. Many of my class and dorm mates didn't have my academic strengths to get them through their first year. I'm convinced that had they made it through the first year, many of those people would have settled down and been productive students. Attendance for credit may have done the trick for some of them.
I concede that I don't know anything about the university system in Portugal. I'd be willing to place a fairly large bet that this is not what's happening at Northern Arizona University.
There's something to be said for easing people into something. Most college freshman have spent their entire academic lives in mandatory attendance settings, many haven't experienced any meaningful independence before moving into the alcohol riddled sex party that is the dorm at a state university.
Think about the people who drop out after the first year, they generally fall into a few broad categories. Partied too much. Woefully unprepared in high school. Can't afford it.
Mandatory attendance won't solve all the problems, if you can convince the budding alcoholic that maybe he really ought to get up for his 9:00 am class on Wednesday morning, he might learn something. If you can get the kid who can't multiply to show up to his math classes and talk to the TAs, instead of panicking trying to teach himself (because the teachers don't make sense) perhaps they can get him into the right class.
I hardly think that's the problem.
In college you schedule your own classes. If you overburdened yourself, that's your problem. If you're trying to support a family (and this is very much an exception) perhaps you should be attending part time.
The reason people don't go to class is (a) they know the material and don't feel compelled to go or (b) they don't want to (usually because they're hung-over).
I stressed about exams occasionally as an undergrad too, but neither I nor any of my friends were ever in a position where we couldn't go to class because we had too much studying to do. Actual classroom time was usually ~30 hours/week.
Part of the larger point is that large taxpayer subsidized public universities tend to have a hard time with freshman retention. There a numerous reasons for this ranging from emotional maturity to being unprepared for higher education to irresponsible use of new found independence. Mandatory attendance might not solve all these problems, but they might solve some of them. If state schools exist at least partially to improve the community, they might be doing the community (especially poor and minority communities) a favor by making their barely adult students attend class for their first year.
The trick is making attendance mandatory for the right classes. Is Chem 121 a large lecture style weed-out course for technical majors? Don't make it mandatory, you'll frustrate the bright kids who don't need to be there and fail to weed out people who are unprepared for a rigorous program. Is Math 101 a small group remedial algebra class? Make attendance mandatory and make it count towards your grade.
Incidentally, I suspect this RFID program gets it exactly backwards.
Wait, what?
BP and Exxon are actors in a competitive market because the price fixing cartel is higher up in the supply chain?
Being fungible and trading on an exchange means you can't pick a supplier.
BP had $8.4 billion cash on hand at the end of 2009 and they made $4.3 billion in profits in 4Q2009. The estimated clean up costs right now are on the order of $14 billion (that's a ROM). They're not going bankrupt, so if they balk at paying one red cent for clean up the federal government ought to seize every one of their assets in this county to recoup the costs.
That's the cap on liability not clean up. Meaning if they decimate a 10 billion dollar fishing industry, they only have to pay $75 million to that industry.
They're still on the hook for the full clean-up costs (more or less...).
Well said.
Let me add two thing. First, Social Security, like all altruistic acts pays dividends. We're social creatures for a reason - it's good for the group.
If you're my neighbor and you make a poor decision (like getting injured on the job or having the poor taste to develop multiple sclerosis) and it wipes you out financially, it's better for me if society can get you back on your feet. Otherwise, the bank forecloses on your house and you die in the gutter with your shopping cart in front of my house - and that can have negative effects on the neighborhood's property values.
Second, 90% of people thing they're better than average drivers. Somehow I bet the same is true for contingency planning.
The cop has to have a reason to be dealing with the person, but "any lawful contact" extends beyond Terry stops to interviewing witnesses or canvassing neighborhoods.
To review:
to detain someone you need a "reasonable suspicion."
to arrest someone you need "probable cause to believe that a crime has been committed."
to ask someone about their immigration status you need "lawful contact."
to ask someone their name you need to have detained them.
to collect identifying information you need to arrest them or file a 3905, which requires, a "Reasonable cause for belief that a felony has been committed."
to demand immigration papers you need ???
It's fine and good to require a cop to ask a question, but this law doesn't specify what happens if the cop doesn't get an answer. In reality, if you tell a cop to ask a question, he's going to assume that whoever he asks has to answer. And that's where, as far as I'm concerned, this law falls down.
Maybe, but requiring someone to answer questions or face arrest appears to be a violation of our fourth and fifth amendment rights.
Sort of. The problem is, first, that the FEDs responsible for enforcing immigration laws have a narrow scope of interaction with the public. Just as it's a bad idea to have the guy who's investigating a burglary in your house to collect your taxes, it's (IMHO) a bad idea to have the same people investigating bodega robberies enforcing immigration laws. Second, it's also not clear that the states are allowed to tell the FEDs, "you're not doing your job, so we're going to do it for you."
Agreed. Regarding Kobach and motives - You described him as a law professor, and I was attempting to point out that he's not some legal scholar drafting legislation from the Ivory Tower. He's a political operative who happens to teach law. Not that there's anything wrong with that as long as there's full disclosure.
Like you said, he can't make something a law by fiat so he's hardly solely to blame - I'm just not going to take his word for it that "legal contact" was intended to be narrowly interpreted when everything else he's done has been designed to make life for Mexicans as difficult as possible.
If that's what he meant when drafting the law, that's what he should have said. The law would have been considerably less onerous if instead of "any lawful contact" the drafters had substituted, "any suspect under police detention of arrest."
I think Kobach's motives are far from pure. He isn't just a law professor, he has a well known agenda. He's worked with Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which has received considerable funding from the Pioneer fund, which "has it's roots in Darwinian-Galtonian evolutionary tradition, and the eugenics movement." Now that's a whole lot of crazy packed into one sentence.
I'm not so worried about the overloaded car where no one has ID. You get the driver for failure to provide a driver's license and the passengers for seat belt violations. I'm more worried about the car with 4 guys in it in the Home Depot parking lot. You've got no reason to ask anyone other than the driver for anything other than their names.
I'm fairly convinced that the way this law is written police are required to inquire as to the immigration status of witnesses if they say something that gives them reasonable cause to believe that they're here illegally, provided it doesn't interfere with the investigation i.e. after you've determined they don't have any good information for you. That to me is very troubling - so much for community policing.
This gets real messy real fast. In order to procure identifying information we've introduced a third standard of evidence, "Reasonable cause for belief that a felony has been committed". I *think* reasonable cause is less than probable cause but more than reasonable suspicion (though I very well could be mistaken) but I also believe that being in this country illegally is not a felony.
If a cop runs the name Juan Gonzalez, and finds one out of thirty with an outstanding warrant and arrests him can he reasonably state he's acting "in good faith"? I'd say no, but I could also see a judge disagreeing.
I'll also note that according your link you can only detain someone for three hours to obtain identifying information. I'm not sure it's possible to go from Terry stop to judicial order to fingerprint collection in that time. And once you've got the info you still have to analyze it - and by then Juan is definitely in the wind.
It is my opinion that this law is a poorly thought out disaster. The irony is that if they had restrained themselves to ascertaining the immigration status of people arrested or detained in a traffic stop it would have accomplished 90% of what they wanted and might actually have stood up to a court challenge. Instead they had to go for he gold and add the "any lawful contact" provision BS.
However, it's clear in AZ (from the first law I linked) that Juan doesn't have to answer those questions. A LEO only needs reasonable suspicion to detain someone, but they need probable cause to arrest. I don't think refusal to answer questions you're not legally obligated to answer can count towards probable cause. I agree that the police are well within their rights to detain him - I think they have a law suit on their hands if they arrest him (and he turns out to be a citizen).
Based on my non-expert reading Hiibel you are only required to cooperate with the police within very narrow bounds, and that non-cooperation is not grounds for suspicion based on the 4th and 5th amendments. I think that providing proof of citizenship is beyond those bounds, but I also don't think it's 100% clear-cut. I will however note that the the dissenting opinions in Hiibel argue that the majority decision is too conservative.
Either way, I expect this law to be challenged in court in short order.
"lawful contact" is ridiculously broad, it's basically anything short of a cop breaking into your house.
If I were looking for a test case for this law, I'd be spreading the word far and wide in AZ that if you're a citizen and a cop asks about your immigration status to refuse to answer - at least until you've been arrested.
Ok, so the new law requires LEOs to ask about the citizenship status of anyone they "reasonably suspect" to be an illegal immigrant. What's not clear to me is whether failure to produce satisfactory documentation should result in giving the officer probable cause to believe that "The person to be arrested has committed any public offense that makes the person removable from the United States." I think this runs afoul of Hiibel and Arizona's own stop and identify law.
Other identifiers that Arizona law specifically states you are not required to give.
It's true that the dems are bleeding supporters, but they're mostly independents that moved into the (d) column when Obama ran. It's important to realize that the democrats loss isn't necessarily the republicans gain. The GOP is tacking HARD right, and while they will almost certainly pick up seats in the midterms, their long term strategy is questionable. People who might stand a chance against Obama in 2012 like Crist and Pawlenty are being purity-tested out of the party and others like McCain and Romney are tripping over themselves getting to the Michele Bachman tea party wing.
Aliens should have to carry their papers. We shouldn't be stopping people on the street to ask for their papers because they might be aliens.
That data is from 2003, which was before the drug violence really heated up in Mexico. If border violence were a problem in El Paso you'd expect the situation to have deteriorated considerably. What has actually happened is that there's been year over year decreases in crime in El Paso.
And if people in El Paso think it's dangerous that's because they're either delusional, or not paying attention. Which, I agree is relevant and might be why AZ passed the law it did. But what it illustrates is that lawmakers should be responsible and not pass laws based on counter-factual fear-mongering nonsense, perhaps they should take their public position seriously and attempt to educate Beck and Dobb's listeners instead of pandering to them.
There is a war going on in Mexico, I don't dispute that. But it's not having an effect on cities on the US side of the border.