> Do you think that the math is irrelevant now that the audience itself has become so woke that it’s basically an echochamber?
I do very much believe that that is your own cognitive biases at work. While it certainly feels like there is a slant in a certain direction to me, I do see plenty of dissenting opinions from that perceived slant that get pretty much as much visbility. Most discourse here IS civil, too, which permits those dissents.
If you do believe that there is bad faith discourse going on, you can always email the mod team to get that sorted out.
My fault for being too broad. I'm in tech of course. The most typical thing you'd see me across borders for at the moment might be the installation of industrial equipment, which you'd expect to be ok under B1, or VWP if under 90 days.
Previously I'd been looking for options to just hang out in countries in the form of digital nomad/working holiday, which the USA also doesn't currently really cover too well. At any rate somehow each type has sharp edges to it which I happen to personally not fit into.
My more recent understanding in the main is that actually most square pegs don't fit into round holes anyway when it comes to international travel, and there's quite a bit of official discretion at every level for people who are trying to do the right thing.
In the USA atm, ICE is sometimes effectively ending up working-to-rule to fill their quota, so a lot of the discretion is negated. The most famous example is when ICE came in and rolled up a spin-up team (B1, VWP) who Hyundai and LG had brought in to stand up a multi-billion-dollar factory investment, for US workers to come work there.
You didn’t have to say “in 2026.” You could have stopped typing at “f’d-up.” Never in the history of the world has a political group been so bent on working for foreigners and against its own citizens.
For me (not OP) a clear example I can give from a collage of my past three visits: arrive at JFK, get in the immigration queue, heavily armed agents walking around, some ICE agents looking tough surrounding the area, someone is directing the queue like we are cattle.
Get to the immigration officer, answer questions, get a cold stare a few times looking at me and my passport, unpleasantly asked why do I have two passports (I'm a dual citizen), told I don't look Swedish (of course, I'm naturalised), get told to wait, they leave to get someone else to check something, two immigration officers start shuffling my passport, wait while no one talks to me or acknowledge I'm there, passport stamped and I get told to "move".
Get my bags, and out of the terminal, on the walk through the terminal there's another 15-20 officers with rifles strutting around, get out of the terminal and there are two massive armoured cars from NYPD parked up front, more cops looking a bit tough.
It's an overwhelming presence of "security" everywhere, signs plastered with messages about how illegal stuff will be punished (littering, leaving your bags unattended, smoking, every message seems to say something about "under penalty of the law").
I think if you live with that all the time it's easy to filter out the noise but there's an eery feeling of oppression all around, like a boot is just waiting the right moment to stomp on you.
Maybe Sweden is different from every other country I’ve visited in Europe…but having traveled quite extensively in the EU, most countries I’ve been to don’t feel much different than the US.
Very immigration officer I’ve ever interacted with has been chilly, it’s not some uniquely American thing.
Pretty much every rail station I went through in Europe had extremely (to my eyes) heavily armed guards standing around. I was also asked to present my passport on several occasions. At one Italian station, it happed twice within a few minutes. I’ve been on multiple trains where some flavor of police comes on, checks people’s papers, and then grab some guy and escort him off at the next stop.
I don't mind the stern-looking armed security or immigration officers, it just feels different in the USA. Being chilly is different than being told to "move", I have never experienced such attitude getting into Schengen, at most it's a mostly quiet stern encounter.
It's very hard to express in text the feeling of oppression, it's not about just armed security, it's the attitude of those, it's the attitude of the people representing the State, it feels much more adversarial in the USA than anywhere I've been in Europe.
Also, it's not about being asked to present a passport but presenting a legitimate passport and being met with "you don't look Swedish".
Perhaps you are just too accustomed to the feeling of the USA, as an outsider it does feel different, and way more oppressive.
Where are you from? It's weird to me that you on the one hand defend the US, but on the other DID notice all these armed guards everywhere you went in Europe. If you don't feel it's different, then I don't think you should have noticed it so much? Or if you do notice it everywhere, why would you equate the US and Europe without raising a critical stance against these kinds of policies on either side of the atlantic?
> Why the fuck are we so soft on these gutter trash in this country.
If you think it's normal to call people "gutter trash" I guess you're too far gone in some bullshit and should do some soul-searching to come back to your humanity.
It must be nerve wracking to live in your shoes day to day. This is, probably due to flying through an airport like JFK. I'm also not sure what you mean by heavily armed agents. Most MPs at airports just have pistols on them.
Nothing wrong indeed with the sticker that says "I value my life more than your truck". Unfortunately that is not the sticker the OP was talking about.
Lores said that: bumper sticker saying "my truck is worth more than your life."
My point is that that is a very sensible bumper sticker, because it only applies if someone thinks they want to steal the truck, clearly valuing their life less than the truck, proving the sticker’s point.
It’s a common sticker. People who are shot in a robbery (or their kin if they don’t survive) commonly claim “why would the victim who defended themselves value their stuff more than the thief’s life” without failing to consider the thief themselves valued their own life less than the stuff they were attempting to steal.
It’s a common sentiment in free places, those who values abiding citizens more than law breaking citizens.
The marketing campaign they launched in April 2023 also deteriorated their brand position. It earned them woke coins, but the NPV of all those future woke coins flows was negative.
People on HN are, of course, going to pretend that moving from Michael Jordan to Dylan Mulvaney and whoever that overweight "Own The Floor" lady aren't a huge downgrade. Wearing Nike became kind of embarrassing.
Jaguar implemented a fairly radical change to their product line, getting rid of all their existing cars, and announcing, but not actually releasing, a new car. As a result, they do not currently sell cars (which, ah, explains the drop in sales that the person you're replying to is going on about); they'll release a new car next month. This is a fairly extreme tactic, but honestly maybe better than just waiting to die, as they had previously been doing.
They also made an ad which a lot of the likes of Musk got very pissy about, for reasons I'm not entirely clear on. Some right wing internet weirdos have claimed that Jaguar's reduction in sales is due to the ad, as opposed to the fact that, just to reiterate, you cannot buy a new car from Jaguar today, because they no longer manufacture any of the cars that they used to sell. This is obviously an extremely stupid claim, but then "extremely stupid" is kinda the far-right twitterati's _thing_.
I mean, you say "even Jaguar". Jaguar has essentially been a dead brand walking for well over a decade. They're currently trying a fairly radical reorientation, which, well, hard to see it _working_, but probably beats just shutting it down, which is probably where it was otherwise heading.
You mention sales plummeting. This is, ah, unsurprising; Jaguar currently doesn't really sell cars (they stopped making the old ones late last year, and the new one doesn't launch til next month). This is a company with an obsolete product line which nobody wants dispensing with it in favour of a new product which they think people might want.
Wouldn't the fact that a Black man was their most popular face throughout their successful period negate the idea that it has anything to do with wokeness? I wish people as obtuse as you would take the time to pause and think every once in a while.
Exactly, wokism (at least how it's perceived by the non-ideological) is about representation for the sake of representation. Which doesn't apply when you're using the sport's (arguably) greatest athlete to promote a product, regardless of race.
> Wouldn't the fact that a Black man was their most popular face throughout their successful period negate the idea that it has anything to do with wokeness?
What does that have to do with wokeness? Sounds kind of racist to imply that.
There is a world in which weapons are not needed. It’s just not a world that exists where there are humans.
I for one want my country to have the best weapons that kill the most enemy combatants in the most efficient way with the fewer non combatant casualties and with the less collateral damage.
For a world without weapons, I usually go to the fantasy isle of the bookstore.
Authoritarian presidents (e.g. Erdogan, Putin, Xi Jiping) do it. Democratic presidents follow institutional processes and diligence.
Your argumentation is very much like: "If the Mafia kills people why shouldn't I also be allowed to kill people?"
> Why are people fretting over this change?
Because it is a diversion from the things that really matter: inflation, war, the loss of international standing of the US. You know when you admonish a little boy about something wrong he did and he replies: "Look over there!". Yep, your country is governed by an octogenarian with the brain of a 4 year old boy. And the people that venerate him are equally stupid.
I think HN became the CNN of tech news (not journalism but “journalism”).
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