Well, more like I think he predates the surveillance state, and by virtue of growing up in Kansas he’s an American and no one would consider thinking otherwise (all of this legal/illegal nonsense is pretty new historically)
I’m not trying to split hairs, but I like to spread reminders that people live where they live, and the idea you can live in a county illegally is inhuman
I mean… I don’t think the paperwork is going to account for spaceships. So… Put the spaceship in the barn, say you found him out in the field, and there’s no fraud
Lies of omission don’t count when you’re dealing with the state
Doesn’t mean the Kent’s didn’t lie, just that they might not have done anything fraudulently
I mean… They kind of didn’t though
In major cities, sure. Even smaller ones will have Indian places. But they’re proportional to the amount of Indians in an area
Because there’s a big difference… Everyone can go to a Chinese restaurant and confidently order. Everyone knows what sushi is, even if some people don’t eat it. Thai foods are less known, but the menus are very Americanized, so you go once and you get the idea
I know the good Indian restaurant back home, but I only know the dishes by color. Lots of naan and wet dishes… They were good, but I couldn’t tell you what they were. And if the sign says Indian food, I don’t know what they serve. So I’ve only been to the one place
Vindaloo and curry? That is everywhere, but I’ve never had an Indian version of it. The British spread vindaloo and curry spread itself
At this point, he’s probably over qualified
But he’d get my vote
How can a baby give false pretense though?
If you find a baby in a field (hiding the spaceship, let’s just leave that quiet), what happens next?
A baby cannot bear false witness… It’s a baby. The parents can, but that doesn’t necessarily affect the baby’s citizenship status
Trade it out for the assumed situation…a Kansas teen gave birth to the kid and left him in a field. This is an American with no documentation… But they’re assumed to be legit by their age. And so they get documentation
And yeah, Superman doesn’t match that situation exactly, but it looks the same from the outside. The state won’t know the difference
Ultimately, there are no illegal people. All these roles are made up… People live where they live. The system is the problem, not the people
Is it fraud though? Not necessarily… You could just say “I found this baby, and now it’s mine”, and if it’s young enough it’ll get birthright citizenship
But this is mostly splitting hairs… But more fundamentally, I don’t believe people can be illegal for existing, so I’m never going to say someone is.
But would Superman get deported if they knew his history? MAGA people are saying they’d deport Jesus if he didn’t come in “the right way”, you tell me
IDK, I’m not that into comics, especially DC
I think they just declared him their son (which is a thing you can do if they’re still X months old) and got him an SSN and birth certificate. If you have an at home birth, you have quite a while to legitimize it
There’s some room for interpretation
He entered illegally, but also didn’t have a choice… But he’s also stateless, which is very bad and very messy
But then he was adopted by citizens, which grants citizenship… Assuming you go through the process. Which varies by iteration of Superman, but generally I think they just said he was their biological child
He’s also an abandoned baby, which means he could get birthright citizenship by virtue of being found on American soil… We just kind of assume random abandoned babies were born here, because what other option is there? Making people stateless is an international human rights violation
But ultimately, he’s not human. He doesn’t get human rights, just like how non-human persons don’t have rights (even if they have certain protections). It doesn’t matter if an orangutan puts on a tie and gets a 9-5 job, even if they could speak and showed the ability to integrate into normal society… At this time, non-human persons are not legally recognized by the US
So… His situation is significantly more tenuous than some of the people getting deported right now. But he probably would have clean paperwork, because the state doesn’t know the details of his origin and his adoptive father was smart enough to hide it from the state
Plus… Like, definitionally, Superman was not born on US soil or to American parents. He doesn’t have birthright citizenship
He’s a literal alien with a fake identity, at the very least he’s an immigrant, in every canon
I think Chinese food spread was more organic, they helped each other immigrate, shared recipes, and acted almost like a franchise in how new restaurants were chosen in unserved areas and given a general playbook
And then the Thai government did it more formally, Korean culinary movement copied the success (or maybe the other way around)
But that’s a response to “they took our jorbs!”. It’s a reframing for immigrants targeted at the reactionaries. But it is the reality - immigrants, particularly undocumented or agricultural visa recipients, are the bedrock of our society
It’s terrible that they are in such unethical conditions. It’s terrible that they have a carve out for child labor for seasonal farm workers. The entire power dynamic is akin to indentured servitude at best
But what we have to do is give them legal status and protections first.
They are not working the worst jobs because that’s what we tell them they can be, they’re working the worst jobs because they’re extra exploitable
Do you not think the soundscape of a place matters? If you don’t understand why it makes a place better, I take back what I said about civilizational collapse
It’s subtle to some people, but it affects your emotions, and how you perceive an environment. We’re wired to go on alert when the forest goes silent, and to pay attention to loud noises… So when a plane, one of the loudest things in modern life, takes off and leaves the airport quiet, that’s deeply disturbing on an animal level. When you walk through long hallways in the depth of night, it’s unsettling no matter how brightly lit it is… Less so if a hundred other people are dragging their luggage and coughing
It’s why they play birdsong and music at Disney… The rattle of a rollercoaster in the distance is terrifying without it
The sounds of life make a place feel safe, even if the paint is peeling, a light flickers, and there’s no one around, the paths at Disney always feel safe
That feeling is civilizational collapse right there
The sign of a dying empire is when you no longer bother to etch designs on the buildings. It’s when you no longer give out swag. It’s when you cut everything that doesn’t make money, but does just make things nice
Doing things just to make things nice is good. It shouldn’t need a reason beyond that
I disagree.
A hundred people died. One man (technically team, I’m sure) saved that many. How many more would have died without what remaining services were in place?
It shows how valuable these invisible support staff are. Maybe, no one would have died without the cuts…
I think it puts this in contrast. And it’s also good to put in people’s heads before the next time they try to make stupid cuts
I’m not sure you get the problem here
You can talk to an llm at any moment of any day. They will engage with you endlessly. They’re becoming the front end for search, and at some point might become the primary interface for your device
It’s a huge problem if they manage to make it a propoganda tool, and that’s the goal here
I literally do that. With real world customers, and real world payments and real world consequences running through the system, all the time.
I live in fear.
It’s a tool, our job is to collect tools in our toolbox and use them appropriately
TDD is great for when you want a really, really tight interface - whether it’s your exposed surface to customers or you’ve got a lot of people working on something, it makes sense to write the standard and code to it, instead of documenting after the fact
Otherwise… Well, in practice it’s an idiot proof methodology. That’s useful, but it is a lot of work
This has been the case since 9/11. I’m so sick of being looked at like I’m an idiot when I’m remove my shoes, then on the flight back they treat me like an idiot for asking if I have to take them off
Nah, they’re actually fantastic at brain numbing tasks. I like to feed it sql tables and have it act like an ORM, but without the tradeoffs of an ORM. I’d never do it manually, but it’s far more readable and easy to work with
I also love using it for api’s. You can feed it a response, say “hey, I just want the id, status, and amount” (or whatever) and it’ll restructure the data for you
These are not hard problems… They are tedious ones though. They solve a problem by brute force, a problem we “solve” over and over because at the end of the day: programmers are lazy.
You can over engineer complex bindings until the cows come home, but a simple pattern with each field explicitly mapped is the best solution. It’s just really, really annoying to actually do it
Ugh…I hate every part of that
I picture Superman as crashing into Kansas in like the '30s, maybe with a bit of a slippery time scale. No way it was in the '90s… But I don’t know enough about Superman to argue the point, I just find the idea really unsettling