When those immigrants were coming to the US, they were not considered “white”. Sometimes the discrimination was because of skin colour, sometimes it was religion. But, they weren’t considered to have the morals and work ethic of the English-descended protestants that dominated the USA.
They still have to file income taxes. But, most places have higher taxes than the USA. Most places also have reciprocal tax agreements with the US. There’s also a deduction of something like $100k, so the first $100k (or local equivalent) you earn in another country isn’t taxed. As a result, unless you’re making high six figures, you don’t actually owe any American taxes.
OTOH, just filing US taxes is a real pain in the ass. In the US it’s made very slightly easier by your employer, bank, etc. all supplying you with the tax forms you need. If you’re overseas, you need to figure out the info you’d need to supply on that form yourself.
You don’t talk about Hitler “more often than not” being popular with Germans. Hitler famously had huge rallies filling stadiums.
Putin is hardly a charismatic leader. Might as well throw in Maduro or Noriega, or Saddam Hussein if you’re going to talk about leaders who ruled through fear and force rather than charisma.
But not charismatic enough to challenge him. That’s key.
Most of them weren’t caught doing anything more than breaking into the capitol building. The ones who actually attacked cops or did something violent got standard prison sentences for those kinds of crimes. Sure, I would have liked longer sentences. But, these were mostly first-time offenders who didn’t do a violent crime, so they got sentences that go with that. The aim of the justice department wasn’t to try to put them in prison for as long as possible, but to treat them the same as any other criminal. Maybe the idea was that that was going to make the cases harder to overturn on appeal because there wasn’t any hint of political bias in the sentencing.
I think it would have had a pretty solid deterrent effect if Trump hadn’t come back and commuted their sentences / pardoned them. But, pardoning them is yet another way he’s completely throwing away the rule book.
Trump is a one in a million manipulator. There’s a reason this hasn’t happened since Hitler and Mussolini. Various others like Marco Rubio, Ron DeSantis, etc. have all tried to use the same playbook and failed completely. If you think MAGA is going to fall in line behind couchfucker JD Vance, you’re deluded. A big reason that Trump picked him as VP is that he knew Vance was no threat to him.
IMO they’re just being lazy. If you just reboot you don’t have to worry about resolving the dependencies for things you upgraded.
And cops are well respected compared to ICE agents, in every way. I’d say about 70% of the US hates ICE agents, whereas about 50% truly like and respect cops. But, even among the die-hard MAGA Republicans who want ICE to snatch people off the street and beat up the non-whites, they still don’t respect them. They’re thugs who are working for their own side.
Fuck that reboot. It’s almost never necessary under Linux. Unnecessary, forced reboots in Windows are one of the last straws that made me fully switch my last remaining Windows system over to Linux.
Jan 6 rioters got a pass because Trump was elected. Once Trump is dead, that’s no longer going to be possible.
What I want to see is people telling these ICE agents the truth.
Point out Trump’s failing health, and that he might not even live long enough to finish his term. Show them that he has attacked anybody who could be his successor so the MAGA movement will collapse as soon as he’s gone.
Let them know that they will be prosecuted like the guards for Hitler’s concentration camps. Just following orders won’t be any excuse. Even if they manage to avoid prison time, the fact they worked for ICE means that when Trump’s out of office, nobody will ever hire them again. It doesn’t matter if they were just doing it to feed their families, being a former ICE member will be seen like being a former member of the Gestapo, a mark of shame for their families for decades to come.
Tell them that hiding their faces isn’t enough. Ask them if they fully trust every other ICE agent, or if ICE might have been infiltrated by protesters. Point out that their fellow agents have already screwed up and left behind lists of ICE agents when they’ve had to leave a place in a hurry. Tell them that with modern cameras it’s just a matter of time before an unusual mole or the edges of a tattoo are enough to identify them.
Then tell them that there’s only one way to salvage their reputations and their future career prospects, and that’s to become whistle blowers.
Why wouldn’t they?
I think I’ve had it happen once over something like a decade of using them. From what I remember it was because I was running something in the terminal that ignored the signals it was sent, so the laptop didn’t properly go to sleep. Of course, the program ended up failing because a lot of the things it depended on did suspend themselves and that caused major breakage.
Luckily I noticed a whining sound (fans at maximum speed) from my backpack before anything too bad happened.
Yeah, I mean, that’s the only part of farming that actually seems interesting to me. It’s not that it makes me want to do it, but I’m curious about tractors using GPS to sow seeds then plow a field. But, John Deere tractors seem even more enshittified than most tech right now.
But, that also emphasizes your other point. To make farming less labour intensive and require less expertise, you can now buy really expensive farming equipment with the latest tech that makes certain aspects of farming easier. But, that equipment is extremely expensive.
Farm work used to be done by slaves. In the US, once slaves were freed, many continued to be farmers because that’s all they knew how to do, and it wasn’t a job that anybody else wanted to do. Now farming has diverged in 2 directions, on one end there’s the (white) farm owner, or upper tier farm worker who owns million-dollar pieces of equipment with all kinds of modern tech. On the other end there are farm workers, who are often illegal immigrants, or at least immigrants on very restricted visas who work the toughest jobs for almost no money. And, both jobs suck.
The suck of the farm worker’s job is obvious. Back breaking labour in terrible weather for almost no pay. It’s a job that nobody with any options would choose to do.
The farm owner’s job sucks too. You’re at the mercy of the weather, and that weather is only getting more unpredictable as the climate changes. You have to invest in extremely expensive equipment just to have a chance, so you might have millions of dollars in assets (harvesters, livestock, land) but your average cashflow is only in the low 6 figures, and in bad years it can be negative. You don’t own your own seeds, you “own” your tractor, but need John Deere’s approval for your own repairs, and you’re kind-of tied to the land.
She doesn’t use facebook, just conspiracy forums.
Not in the slightest.
But, where I used to super interested in cutting-edge tech stuff, I’m now extremely jaded. I used to actively seek out news on new tech companies / projects because it genuinely felt like there were a lot of problems out there to be solved, and tech was solving those problems. These days it seems like tech often is the problem, and it’s never going to be solved because they have the DMCA, Section 230, trillions of dollars, and the entire apparatus of the state ensuring that their shitty tech keeps getting in your way.
The thing is, I still like tech. I can’t imagine living in a world without it. Whenever I see these memes about people wanting to become farmers it amazes me, because farming sucks. I don’t like the great outdoors, the indoors is far greater. I can appreciate non-digital tech. An internal combustion engine is a really cool gadget, for example. And, I’m happy to do my own bike maintenance. But, real world things are greasy, loud, and inelegant. It amazes me when people claim to like record players instead of good quality digital media. It’s amazing how record players work, but they’re still terrible, outdated things that objectively produce a less accurate sound than a good digital file. I still prefer technology, preferably digital technology. I just don’t like the stuff that makes up 95% of the Internet these days.
It sounds like you really feel the same way, because:
get a dumb phone
That’s tech.
a CD player
Also tech.
check out books, movies, music, and games
I’m pretty sure any movies and music you check out from the library in 2025 will be digital, that’s tech.
Have you found ways to reconnect with technology?
If you don’t like it, don’t reconnect. Become a farmer or a fisherman or whatever makes you happy. But, I’m not going to join you. I may be veering a lot more towards DIY tech, and offline things than I used to. But, to get me to abandon technology you’ll have to pry it from my cold, dead hands.
How many rallies has Putin held?