KingMachiavelli

1. Born in typical midwest American town from American parents also born in the US just as their parents (at least 4 generations) 2. Nope, met after arrival. 3. Studies completed and employed legally. 4. "How soon after her last entry to the US did you get married" - actually maybe an issue, we just happened to travel internationally before deciding to get married sooner. But it would be silly to not return to the country you live and work in just because you took a vacation. 5. CBP doesn't even ask questions when you re-enter with valid visa documentation. 6. No previous marriages of either party. 7. No criminal history, not even a speeding ticket. 8. Nope, went to school, graduated, started working, so on.

We live together and spend >90% of our non-working time together so I can't imagine an interview being a problem.

As you can see, besides maybe the "crime" of taking an international vacation, our case is as simple as it should be.

> Also, anecdotally, USCIS seems to be taking advantage at interviews of people who don't have a lawyer by threatening the citizen to withdraw the case or by getting the citizen or immigrant to agree not facts that aren't in evidence or aren't true and then using those facts to deny or delay the case.

I mean that's really the issue. USCIS appears to be intentionally adversarial.

Absurd, currently trying to figure out how to sponsor my wife and now this. The wording seems to imply that even those here on valid non-immigrant visas (F1) would need to apply via their home country. It doesn’t help that I130+I485 (AOS) could take over a year to process?

If you have filed I485 and they fail to process it before your current visa expires (D/S ends like F1 OPT). Then what? You just have to leave, abandon AOS and re-apply for CR1?

It’s insane that the simplest immigrant pathway; spousal green card could take 12+ months and may now require temporarily moving and being separated. Guess I actually will be paying $4K for a lawyer (plus the 3-4K just to file the USCIS forms).

I wish they would just have a simple fast lane for the 100% legal, non-complicated case.

> But I don't see what other options are available for states to compete with each other if not through tax breaks.

They should compete based on actual policy including tax policy. "Tax breaks" for specific projects are just unfair and a quick race to the bottom. Instead, areas should be required to treat all entities equally. Even tax breaks for specific industries like tv/film production are unfair but at least industry wide tax breaks treat individual entities more fairly.

If a state's taxes are too high to attract investment, then they should have to lower taxes for everyone (of the same type).

> exempt from state and local sales and use taxes on its data center equipment for the next 20 years

That said, the real issue IMO is that "use taxes" are just absurd to start with. Why should a random city/town be taxing products neither made nor sold in their jurisdiction. If anything, the sale of the datacenter product/services should be taxed but the external inputs "imported" from other states or countries is crazy to tax.

Again, I will die on the hill that a land value tax makes this all very simple. A LVT is the perfect strategy for extracting public value from data centers since electricity & water availability is a major input to a lands value.

Frankly, I think we need to bring back corporal punishment for specific crimes. The process to arrest, prosecute, and then imprison people for "public space crimes" is basically flawed.

Arresting and prosecuting is slow and expensive, prisons are full. A prison sentence destroys whatever remaining support system a person has and a conviction like that makes getting a job in the future nearly impossible.

We should just have a quick path to short and non-damaging corporal punishment. A quick video recording, an instant review by a judge via zoom, then immediate punishment. This would deter theft, damaging public property, etc. while not costing a lot to taxpayers and not causing long term damage to the individual. Crime is never on the record at all so does not affect background checks. Treatment programs are always offered instead of the corporal punishment.

(Of course mental health conditions complicate this, it's difficult to solve that without forced institutionalizing them).

I'd like to understand why the WiFi spec developed so slowly from G to N and finally to AC but now it's seems like a new version is released every other year yet many of the features/extensions are poorly implemented or have nearly 0 real world improvement.

Wouldn't the app registering the card provide the card image? And actually cards from the same provider/app are suppose to occupy the same "vertical" slot but then show a horizontal dialog. Also, I bet even with the identical looking 20px preview, the actual order is consistent so just remember which is which - same interface physical cards provide.

Is there a reason to not pick a single card as your default payment card? I find it's pretty rare I need to pick a card manually unless it's a store card or card for specific spending type (resturants, gas, etc.)

LoRaWAN seems interesting but the documentation and availability of is either "Crypto hobby project from Seedstudio" or "Strange telecom companies selling $900 base stations that still expect an internet connection (for licensing?)". Maybe I'm missing something but the LoRaWAN doesn't see to sell itself very well when half the vendors are behind "Contact for quote" pages.

Of course, for real emergencies I have a Garmin SOS device. It would just be "nice" to have something for local 2-5 km communication that doesn't need a clear view of sky, works partially underground, etc. GMRS is "fine" but from a physics perspective a digital signal with Chirp encoding should go further and be more reliable.

Seems like JS8Call or Packet radio might more in line with what I want. It's just surprising that something like Meshtastic hasn't replaced them.

So what’s the real solution for when Starlink is too expensive and too high power? I really want to solution for remote mountaineering communication that’s not just GMRS. And what about remote weather sensors? I really don’t need a full internet connection just to send a tiny payload every 5 minutes.

Meshtastic should be the obvious answer for this but in my limited experience the app(s) and code are buggy on even the most typical hardware. Wish it wasn’t the case but it is.

> claim data centers produce no long term pollutants whatsoever While running. Incurring a pollution penalty once in fungible location (i.e where mines are approved and "hopefully" managed responsibly) is better than incurring pollution proportional to the output (e.g. plastic and chemical waste).

> shouldn’t have to explain how rare earth mining harms millions around the globe.

Is rare earth mining specifically for semiconductor manufacturing actually a significant driver? My intuition is that rare earth and most raw material mining would be driven much more by EV car motors and batteries.

Certainly you can say all energy use is indirectly responsible for the pollution of the oil, solar, wind, etc. I don't disagree at all! I'm say in-addition to the pollution of raw inputs like energy - contemporary industries have additional and unavoidable side products.

> are earth mining harms millions around the globe.

Those mines are going to operate day after day because it's unfortunately the best economic opportunity in those areas. Those areas deserve our support to improve their socioeconomic realities but opposition to data centers in rich countries does not suddenly provide better opportunities to those regions.

I often get side tracked into commenting on regular social media like Instagram and I'm somehow surprised over and over how poor critical thinking skills in the greater population. The zeitgeist of US politics is "this doesn't directly benefit me so this must be bad". According to the Instagram demographic, ALL industrial uses of water and electricity are bad because they "compete" with household use. The massive Agricultural industrial complex is actually OK because I like meat, almonds, etc. AI is bad because it doesn't make my job easier.

Even among the more "globally conscious", there's a severe misunderstanding of how much industry, factories, and overall "consumption" it takes to feed the Western - especially American - way of life. If running data centers can actually sustain the next 10-15 years of ~2% GDP growth, that's literally an economic miracle. An industry that takes in water & electricity yet produces no long term pollutants is literally the closest you can get to money growing on trees.

What other industry in history of the US's economic development has been this clean? I can't think of any. I'm surprised more data centers are not just built in Mexico or other countries that would support rather than oppose/block their development.

`nosuid` and probably `nodev` should IMO be the default filesystem mount options. `/dev` is already a special devtmpfs and the initrd minimal /dev can just explicitly mount the initrd tmpfs rootfs with `dev` and `suid` if necessary.

Letting SUID binaries just "exist" anywhere is a stupendous security issue. What if you mount some external storage medium, how are you to verify that none of the SUID binaries on that block device are malicious.

Additionally, this exploit appears to only work if the user executing the SUID binary can also read the SUID binary. There's no reason for non-root users to have read on a SUID binary.

NixOS does this correctly. No SUID in the normal package installation directory `/nix/store` and no package leakage outside of that no `nosuid` can safety be used on all other mountpoints. The exception is just a single-purpose `/run/wrappers.$hash` directory that safety contains executable ONLY SUID wrappers.

> My neighbors just gave Ford $60k. It'll be a while until my neighbor gives Anthropic $60k.

How much of that 60K does Ford actually keep? And how much will it be once BYD is allowed in the US? The forecast for Ford is pretty much only downwards, the possible upside on AI is huge.

If every company in the F500 starts spending $2000+ on AI credits per employee, then every consumer product will indirectly be funding AI companies. I think it's already the case that companies small enough to avoid/skip getting O365 or Google Suite subscriptions will pay for AI first.

I don't think this is where peak battery tech ends up. At current capacities, batteries are becoming genuinely dangerous, and faster charging only amplifies the risk. Charging high-capacity cells outside a temperature-controlled charger is risky, and even reputable chargers shouldn't be left unattended — many workplaces ban it outright (it only takes one fire to make that policy). Phone batteries are the worst of it: highest power density, fastest charging, odd geometry, and tight space constraints. Manufacturers shrink the phone by offloading temperature monitoring and heat dissipation onto the phone's own electronics and housing — so replaceable, externally rechargeable batteries are tricky to design. IMO, swappable batteries were a feature because batteries used to suck. In less volume-constrained devices like cameras, swappable batteries still work — but you're trading single-charge runtime for that convenience.

This last point is actually a real killer, an easily swappable battery in a phone probably sacrifices >10% "maximum" capacity in lost space. e.g a phone with a glued battery can have 5000mAh but the same phone with a more durable battery connector can only be 4500mAh.

They 100% should have communicated this change, absolutely unacceptable to change behavior without an extremely visible warning.

However, backing up these kinds of directories has always been ill-defined. Dropbox/Google Drive/etc. files are not actually present locally - at least not until you access the file or it resides to cache it. Should backup software force you to download all 1TB+ of your cloud storage? What if the local system is low on space? What if the network is too slow? What if the actually data is in an already excluded %AppData% location.

Similar issue with VCS, should you sync changes to .git every minute? Every hour? When is .git in a consistent state?

IMO .git and other VCS should just be synced X times per day and it wait for .git to be unchanged for Y minutes before syncing it. Hell, I bet Claude could write a special Git aware backup script.

But Google Drive and Dropbox mount points are not real. It’s crazy to expect backup software to handle that unless explicitly advertised.

The profits of auto manufacturing are distributed to US stock holders. The same won’t be true for foreign companies. For very large industries, this is a large amount of capital either staying or leaving the US.

Also, it’s unlikely that the low prices could be maintained while also paying US labor and US safety standards. If they can then it means we’ve lost our competitive edge completely in the manufacturing sector. At that point we’d be reliant on foreign companies to operate locally here.

IMO the consumer PC industry is near an existential crisis. The big players are just awful at marketing; too many SKUs and models - it takes a paragraph to figure out how 2 Dell laptops from the same release year differ. The exact same specs will be in two different chassis designs.

Additionally, you can’t count on the basic being correct. It takes a hour of research to know if the trackpad is not-awful, keyboard doesn’t suck, and display isn’t a 300nits POS unusable even in a bright room.

You want the same performance as a MacBook Air without one of these fatal flaws? You’ll hand to spend $1500+ anyway so you save nothing. Then the OS is full of ads and pre-installed garbage “gaming-optimization-tool” or driver tools taking up 99% of a single core while being riddled with security holes.

AFAIK Fith Amendment only protects against self-incrimination, you absolutely can be subpoenaed to testify against someone else and failing to produce truthful testimony is a crime.

VMWare is far easier solution for normal enterprises than K8s. K8s more suited for having many small VMs that can be quickly deleted and recreated i.e modern microservice architecture. vSphere & friends is more targeted for running very large database, oriented application that need high uptime and are very long lived. VMWare can live migrate a running OS between physical hosts so that you can have continuous uptime. VMWare works with any OS so it's especially used by any Microsoft based orgs which the majority of hospitals, schools, government offices are.

If you are deploying enterprise apps from the 1990-2000s you use vSphere, if you are building your own SaaS product then you use K8s.

Comparing a companies current valuation to it's all-time or 52-week high isn't really useful. NVDIA is down ~14% from it's ATH but 25x it's initial market cap; it's certainly returned value to it's investors.

What matters more is change relative to it's market cap at IPO. And yes this is significantly worse for newer companies. There is a clear trend showing the 2010-2022 tech IPO market pushed valuations pre-IPO to insane levels such that post-IPO growth was limited or even negative meaning retail investors never had an opportunity to hold equity.

Sure but AFAIK FedNow is not going to hold funds or authority to payback or revert "fraudulent" transactions?

If I lend out $X dollars but my client says the loan was accessed fraudulently then who pays for this loss? The bank, the payment processor (FedNow/Visa), the customer, or the vendor?

The actual lender for a CC is not Visa, it's the associated bank that's backing the CC. So the redistribution of wealth is occurring on the banks books not Visa's.

The ideal solution for this is the LVT is split between each level of government and it's parent. Each level receives tax revenue based on the market value after it's own zoning and all other restrictions apply. But each level must pay it's parent government based on the land value without any of local zoning or restrictions imposed.

For example, Aspen Colorado can certainly just ban all new construction outright and collect taxes accordingly. But it would owe the state Colorado tax revenue based on the theoretical land value of Aspen's total land.

This preserves local control as much as possible but forces communities to fairly compensate the rest of the country should they choose to purposely under utilize their land. E.g if SF doesn't build more housing then Austin now has to build more, etc.

At the same time, since the Federal gov owns 90% of Nevada, Nevada as a state wouldn't be forced to make up the tax revenue for that land since all of its rules and restrictions come from a parent government (Federal/BLM rules).

Agree it isn't practical to block everything while still allowing software engineers to do their job. An online regex tester is super useful or could be a big risk is an employee uses it incorrectly.

But it is helpful to block certain things that are just too common outside of work so people just don't think twice. Things like ChatGPT, Grammerly, Pastebin, etc. should be manually blocked.

> Some of these high county-level percentages stem from high populations of immigrants, whose first language is not English. The PIAAC only assesses English literacy, though its background questionnaire is given in English and Spanish.

If you look at the map (and read the article), it's fairly obvious that they are NOT adjusting for non-English first language speakers. This is partly on purpose since it's those demographics that need the most assistance and funding to learn English. However, it's really disappointing that this data is used to make statements and titles regarding people's "literacy" or reading comprehension when it's specifically testing a single language.

No the resources you used would have degraded since you were in uni. Since people use the internet, less people are using the library so the library gets less funding, professors aren't checking if the library has enough copies of books, etc. But just culturally unless you've been primarily using non-electronic methods of education; then you are just always worse at doing so.

If I live my regular professional life using stackoverflow, man pages , Wikipedia, Google Scholar, etc. then I become very proficient using those. It doesn't make any sense forcing students to learn research methods they aren't going to use outside the classroom at least not at the expense of prohibiting the de-facto, gold standard of information sharing i.e the internet.

Saying you can learn without a phone/internet is like saying you can travel via horse or find a job via the classified section. Efficient research and learning is a network dependent skill; if other people use X then you need to know X not Y .

It's actually quite convenient, school desks are quite small so trying to fit a textbook and your homework notebook is quite cramped. You can just put your phone directly next to the HW problem. High schoolers and college students still have good eyes lol.

Sure but why would you want to? I can lookup 10x the number of sources just using LibGen and Google Scholar than I can in a real library.

A ban on cell phones would make doing homework a lot more difficult. It's far easier to have textbooks on your phone than carrying them around all day. Almost impossible to write any kind of paper without the internet.

Really can't recommend Nix for Python stuff more, it's by far the best at managing dependencies that use FFI/native extensions. It can be a pain sometimes to port your existing Poetry/etc. project to work with nix2lang converters but really pays off.

Only if by "consumer protection" you are OK getting your Ebay account banned. Ebay already provides there own buyer protection... but if you disagree with them and do a charge back then most likely your account will be banned.