I do not sell tourism services. I sell software. If there is less foreign tourism in the US, nice places will be less crowded. So, what are my incentives to ask my government to ease foreign entry to my country?
Tourism pays taxes for the government services you receive and specifically pays for upkeep of and infrastructure around attractions that you may find useful yourself.
I don't agree with the premise that the US makes entry for normal tourists particularly onerous though.
This person is a US citizen. What happens if he just said nothing (beyond identifying and answering basic questions) and refused to cooperate? How long could they hold him? As a citizen they have to allow him to enter eventually.
According to the ACLU I think this person would have been better off saying little and not wiping their phone.
And they would have taken his phone, pulled it apart and cloned the memory to get the data. And in a month or three, returned his phone to him in some condition which may or may not include "working".
I've done that and they held me for about a day, strip and cavity searched me, imprisoned me, "diesel therapy" me across the state while taking me to multiple private ER claiming there were drugs up my ass to run up hospital bills in my name. They've also threatened to revoke my passport or deny me entry to the country (both failed).
They also would not allow me access to a lawyer during questioning or imprisonment.
Another woman was at the same port of entry, was raped to "check for drugs", sued, and lost. Apparently raping is a legal way to search for drugs (that were not there).
It annoys me that recently people seem to propagate the wrong use of em dashes. There is no space—an em dash is practically never typeset with spacing. You use an en dash in European typesetting – they have spaces, which your typesetting system hopefully adjusts to sane values. They're not like the spaces between words.
At least, that's how I learned it. Everyone seems to disagree and write em dashes with spaces nowadays.
Agreed that it (used to be) less common. AP style (like the article mentioned) uses spaced em dashes, and I think that style of spaced em dashes are more common in writing today because that's what Claude (particularly Sonnet) likes to use (based on some half-baked investigation I did a bit ago [^1]). OpenAI models generally uses the American-style unspaced em dashes, which is why that particular style looks LLM-y to people now.
Gemini Pro has become so bad for my purposes -- copy & paste Go programming and code analysis with the web GUI -- that I'll take any model with equivalent capabilities at the same price or lower. I don't care where it comes from, I'm not dealing with state secrets and, frankly speaking, US corporations have an abysmal track record regarding safety and surveillance.
Question about this from a EU citizen who doesn't know the details of how the EU works (who does?): Are there legal means to challenge this vote based on the procedure that was taking place?
The problem is easy to solve by making 99% of all apps normal apps that don't get any special privileges and don't require any developer certification, and having a certified developer program with heavily locked down run mode for the 1% of high security apps like banking and payment apps. It's not hard to attest unambiguously to the user in some way whether they are running one of these rare secure apps or a normal one, a restricted API suffices but you could also just add an LED for it.
You can't possibly convince me that Google couldn't develop something like that if they wanted to.
>and having a certified developer program with heavily locked down run mode for the 1% of high security apps like banking and payment apps.
How do you determine/enforce whether an app is a "payment app" without a centralized developer program? They don't require any special privileges. After all, most banking apps have web equivalents.
How does Android know if an apk that nobody has ever seen before is a payment or banking app?
You could probably restrict "risky" APIs like draw-over-other-apps, but tbh I think that would be a worse solution than just making people wait 24 hours once.
What Anthropic is doing is illegal in many jurisdictions. I don't know about the legal situation for the Chinese domains they mark, but steganographic data extraction without user consent would definitely be illegal in the EU, for example.
That's not correct. Many slippery slope arguments are perfectly valid and sound, namely whenever there is plausible evidence for the existence of the respective slippery slope. It can for instance be based on historical precedents, or on probabilistic or convincing balance of consideration sub-arguments for the slippery slope premise.
Whether its a fallacy or not depends a lot on how warranted the slippery slope premise is (notwithstanding other, possible logical errors that might me made in setting up the argument, of course).
Wars are sometimes caused by small acts of violence (e.g. at the border) that are mutually retributed, becoming larger and larger, until the hostilities turn into an all out war. This is sometimes called "escalation of violence." If wars are sometimes caused in that way, then there must be some wars for which a slippery slope argument concerning the escalation of violence is not fallacious.
> Yes, in an ideal world, it would all go down to parenting. Since we live in reality, some of that work is shifting to ensuring defaults are in place.
No, they aren't in place at all. It's the parents' job and vast majority of parents do it fine. Nobody wants the Nanny state you propagate.
reply