why were highly skilled Korean engineers working “illegally” in USA to begin with?

Most of them say they had valid visas or work authorization.

The U.S. has a visa waiver program where people can come into the U.S. without a visa, and have certain rights similar to visa holders. Many of the South Korean workers have taken the position that the visas they had that allowed them to work for 6 months, or the visa waivers they had entitled them to do temporary work for less than 90 days, and that they were within those time windows.

The lawsuits being filed also allege that immigration officials acknowledged that many of the workers did have legal rights to work, but that they were deported anyway.

So no, I don’t think it’s been shown that the workers did anything illegal. It really sounds like ICE fucked up by following a random tip a little too credulously.

It has long been used as a transitive verb. The Oxford English Dictionary has collected examples going as far back as 1897 using it generically to make something disappear, but this particular meaning, of government officials forcibly abducting a person and not explaining where the person went, really started to pick up by the 1960’s. The novel Catch-22, published in 1961, had a character use it in the transitive way, with the protagonist complaining that it wasn’t even proper grammar. And that novel was popular enough that it started to appear a lot shortly afterwards, in magazines and newspapers and books.

The American political system was designed for weak parties, and geographical representation above all, in a political climate where there were significant cultural differences between regions.

The last time we updated the core rules around districting (435 seats divided as closely to proportionally as possible among the states, with all states being guaranteed at least one seat, in single member districts) was in 1929, when we had a relatively weak federal government, very weak political parties, before the rise of broadcasting (much less national broadcasting, or national television, or cable TV networks, or universal phone service, or internet, or social media). We had 48 states. The population was about 120 million, and a substantial number of citizens didn’t actually speak English at home.

And so it was the vote for the person that was the norm. Plenty of people could and did “switch parties” to vote for the candidate they liked most. Parties couldn’t expel politicians they didn’t like, so most political issues weren’t actually staked out by party line.

But now, we have national parties where even local school governance issues look to the national parties for guidance. And now the parties are strong, where an elected representative is basically powerless to resist even their own party’s agenda. And a bunch of subjects that weren’t partisan have become partisan. All while affiliations with other categories have weakened: fewer ethnic or religious enclaves, less self identity with place of birth, more cultural homogenization between regions, etc.

So it makes sense to switch to a party-based system, with multi member districts and multiple parties. But that isn’t what we have now, and neither side wants to give up the resources and infrastructure they’ve set up to give themselves an advantage in the current system.

Mandatory until the European Commission updates the standard. The law mandating the use of USB-C explicitly has a procedure for how to propose a new standard to supersede the current one.

I fear that the likes of Trump in charge will only reverse any progress we’ve made in the West.

It may end much of the progress towards people voluntarily sacrificing for the environment, but I think certain technologies are already on a runaway self sustaining cycle:

• Heat pumps and electrification of residential heat is starting to make financial sense, even without subsidies and tax breaks.
• Electrification of cars makes transportation cheaper. In some countries, much, much cheaper.
• Solar power, during times of day that it is plentiful, is basically the cheapest energy source known to mankind. There is plenty of financial incentive to try to shift supply (through grid scale storage tech) and demand (time shifting things like heating/cooling and car charging) to meet this super cheap source of energy.

Trump can rant about carbon-free replacements for fossil fuels, but he can’t make them more expensive, especially not outside of the U.S.

That’s a good chart, and probably a better metric to use.

Still, you can see the same overall trends: the western world peaking around 2000, with India and China catching up. The question, then, becomes whether and how much the rest of the world can follow the West’s playbook:

• Switching from coal to natural gas for electricity generation (easy for North America, more difficult for Europe)
• Switching from fossil fuels entirely to carbon-free sources like nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal (depends heavily on geography and access to nuclear materials and engineering).
• Switching from fossil fuels to cleaner electrified drivetrains
• Improving energy efficiency in residential, commercial, industrial applications.

This is where the difference is made. Not in changing birth rates.

The big assumption is that the child you have will likely consume carbon-emitting goods and services at the same rate as whatever average they’re assuming.

Breaking down by country shows that people’s emissions vary widely by year and by country:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita

So if the UK spent most of the 20th century, and into the beginning of this century, emitting about 10 tonnes per person per year. Now it’s down to less than 5. Since your linked article was written in 2017 to the latest stats for 2023, the UK has dropped per capita emissions from 5.8 to 4.4, nearly a 25% reduction.

During that same 125 years, the US skyrocketed from about 7 tonnes to above 20, then back down to 14.

The European Union peaked in around 2001 at 10, and have since come down to 5.6.

Meanwhile, China’s population has peaked but their CO2 emissions show no signs of slowing down: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-metrics

So it takes quite a few leaps and assumptions to say that your own children will statically consume the global or national average at the moment of their birth. And another set of assumptions that a shrinking population will actually reduce consumption (I personally don’t buy it, I think that childless people in the West tend to consume more with their increased disposable income). And a shrinking population might end up emitting more per capita with some sources of fixed emissions amounts and a smaller population to spread that around for.

If the US and Canada dropped their emissions to EU levels we’d basically be on target for major reductions in global emissions. If we can cap China’s and India’s future emissions to current EU per capita levels that would go a long way towards averting future disaster, too.

It can be done, and it is being done, despite everything around us, and population size/growth is not directly relevant to the much more important issue of reducing overall emissions.

Those companies are creating the pollution to make the things we buy. They know how to reduce output when demand goes down (see March and April 2020 when COVID caused lots of canceled flights and oil drilling/refining to reduce to the bare minimum to keep the equipment maintained).

Yes, ExxonMobil and American Airlines pollute, but when I buy from them, they’re polluting on my behalf.

I think it’s healthy for opposing viewpoints to be expressed

Yeah, that way the community can get inoculated with these ideas and learns how to respond to them, and over enough time the response gets faster and more efficient so that the body as a whole builds up a resistance against whenever those types of comments show up.

How you gonna keep them down on the farm factory (after they’ve seen Paris a school library stocked with books)?

That’s not an outrageous medical bill. It’s an outrageous bill for clawing back government benefits for those whose full time care for family members prevents them from working.

It’s not a dismissal. It was stricken, with the option to refile the exact same substance in a new format.

And this kind of stuff happens all the time, like when someone forgets to attach a table of contents, a certificate of compliance, a certificate of word count, an incorrect word count, improperly formatted documents, etc.

This is a pretty common response to improper format, like certain courts that require a particular font, a particular page size, a particular spacing requirement, etc. Those usually have a written rule the court can point to and say “hey follow local rule so and so” and just make them re-file.

It’s a little bit less common where someone violates an unwritten rule, and the court comes in and says “cmon you should’ve known better.” But it happens.

You use Signal to avoid government surveillance.

I use Signal to avoid government accountability.

We are not the same.

Slim Charles, one of the Barksdale enforcers from The Wire.

In 2024.

Helpfully highlighting the baseline so that we can see how much it changes over time.

You’re still too narrowly focused.

The courts can and still do order the executive branch to follow the law, and undo unlawful actions, and order them to follow the law into the future. That’s the whole reason why at any given time there are thousands of lawsuits against the government under the Administrative Procedure Act, and the type of lawsuit being brought against Trump’s new policies.

If he ignores court orders, that’s a constitutional crisis, but it also really fucks up his chain of command. Elon Musk can’t fire thousands of people or freeze thousands of contracts, he has to direct the thousands of people who actually control those things to do the paperwork to do that, and those individual civil servants won’t violate court orders.

The lawsuits are important, and people need to not roll over and just accept Trump’s illegal actions.

This is a misconception that should stop.

The Supreme Court ruled that the executive branch can’t bring criminal charges against someone for acts that were done as President.

Here’s what that doesn’t stop:

• Criminal cases against the former president for non-official acts.
• Civil cases against the former president for acts, whether official or non-official.
• Criminal charges against anyone else who wasn’t literally the president
• Civil cases against the government, its agencies, its officers, or its employees.

The Supreme Court fucked up when it said prosecutors can’t use official acts as evidence relating to unofficial acts, which basically made it impossible to prosecute a whole bunch of types of crimes.

But what it doesn’t do is stop people from suing the government, here and now, for breaking the law, or stop the courts from ordering the government to comply with the law.

And the scope of immunity covers only the President personally. Any other adviser, employee, or officer can still be prosecuted for breaking the law, including following the President’s illegal orders.

Part of the Trump strategy right now is to demoralize the opposition and make us believe that he actually has all the power. He doesn’t, at least not yet. We shouldn’t make it easy for him by assuming that he can break the law with impunity, and instead we should make sure we continue to do everything in our power to hold him and everyone who helps implement his agenda accountable.

Microplastics are stored in the balls.

In the U.S., they meter gas by the “therm,” which is defined as 100,000 BTUs. It’s a misconception that it’s equal to 100 cubic feet of natural gas at standard temperature and pressure, and is merely a coincidence that those values are very close.

BTUs are like a shitty imperial calorie, the energy it takes to heat up one pound of water by one degree fahrenheit.

Also, don’t confuse therms for thermies, a totally different unit that means the amount of energy required to heat up a tonne (1000 kg) (not to be confused with the imperial ton that is 2000 pounds) of water by 1°C.

Energy is so useful in so many different contexts that we can just always expect a million ways to express it.

It’s pretty common to use acre inches and acre foot as a unit of volume for measuring water in agriculture, water use, flood mitigation, etc.

So if we can use area height as a volumetric unit, by not volume/area as a height unit?