Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re: Trump has expanded the high skill work visas (Score 3) 235

No, it's not. It is legal to go to a port of entry and request asylum, not to enter the country without permission.

"It is legal and correct to enter the country and then apply for asylum."

There is a "clause" that allows someone who did enter the country illegally to request asylum after an illegal entry -- providing they requested the asylum in a timely manner -- then they would get no penalty for the illegal crossing. It most certainly isn't "legal and correct" in the sense you imply.

The "streamlining" that was done by the previous administrator clearly overwhelmed the system. I would argue that it was by designed to do that by the sheer volume streaming across the boarder and the administration's protests that everything was fine and dandy. Another clue that the policy was piss-poor is to look at how many asylum seekers were granted asylum -- often well below half over the last 10 years (fluctuates between less than 20% to less than half).

Lets look at the numbers:

4 years before Trump, there were something like 8 million border encounters (mostly on the southern border). About 5 million were "paroled" for entry to apply for asylum. Of those, only about 1 million have applied. Of that 1 million, anywhere between 20% and less than half will be granted. And, that doesn't account for "got aways", which are around 1-2 million. And these are conservative estimates.

So, of just the numbers of encounters during those 4 years, only 1 million submitted paperwork for asylum. Remember that "timely manner" bit?

Allowing a flood of humans in to our country is a horrible practice that no other country allows to the extent that the US does. We're 3x (per capita) the number of illegal/undocumented immigrants than Europe BEFORE Biden.

Comment Re:Trump has expanded the high skill work visas (Score 2) 235

"Tom and his ICE are deporting only about twice as many people as his predecessors -"

They and this administration have also turned down the flood of illegal border crossings that the previous administration refused to acknowledge for 3 years. And then the only "solution" that came out of that administration and it's congress' was to try make what they were doing legal and demanded the opposition accept it.

Note: I'm a never Trumper. I'm proud to say I didn't vote for Trump in 6 elections (3 primaries and 3 national elections), but he's right on immigration and border crossings. Implementation has had problems that need correcting, but we need to enforce our laws with regards to immigration and work permissions. I also married someone who came to the US legally at age 19 with her family from Syria. She became a citizen in her mid 20s. It can be done legally.

Trying to paint this as some racist/facist action that's only targeting "brown people" is just an outright lie. Most people in the US without status are Hispanic and a great plurality are from Mexico.

Comment Does it matter? (Score 4, Insightful) 43

Regardless of whatever budget Congress sets, the majority party has already been clear that they have no intent to enforce it. If the president uses the NASA money for something else, or even just puts it into his own personal pocket, we can be confident that he won't be impeached, and if impeached, he won't be convicted.

The only thing that matters is the total budget. The president is free to spend that total however he wishes. This isn't the law as written, but it's the law defacto. If voters have a problem with that (do they?) they can choose a different party to be the majority.

Comment Re:What do you expect? (Score 1) 160

"In exchange for this you will get access to substantially more money than if you didn't go to college."

No you don't. You have a CHANCE to access that.

The problem is there are much more college graduates than jobs that warrant that "substantially more money".

The hardest hit are those with certain arts or humanities jobs -- at least as far as pay. a BA/BS just isn't going to win you that 6-figure pay to allow someone to pay off their student loans unless you planned your major very well.

To be fair, some of the blame goes to employers. They want experience and real world skills -- which virtually NOBODY has right out of college. Its like they are hunting unicorns instead of training horses.

Comment Re:U2 album fiasco all over again (Score 2) 78

Last I heard, Apple sales haven't plummeted and thrown them into bankruptcy, so it sounds like they learned the lesson just fine: it's fine to show people ads. People might complain a little bit, but they won't stop buying. Cost is $0 and ad revenue is presumably more than $0.

If someone is stuck with your proprietary software and you aren't showing them ads, then you're leaving money on the table. What're they gonna do, fork it out?

Comment Black hole maximum rotation speed (Score 1) 41

the outer edge of the mass exceeding the speed of light

That intuitively makes sense, but I thought part of the black hole cheat is that it doesn't have an edge. I thought they were literally singularities, with a circumference of zero. Apparently not the case?

How a thing with a circumference of zero could meaningfully "rotate" is beyond me, but I thought this (and many other suspected properties of rotating black holes) was supposed to be beyond my ignorant layman understanding!

Comment Choose protocol before choosing implementation (Score 2) 30

An adversary can coerce a proprietary software producer to compromise the code. That's what we're going to see here.

An adversary cannot time-travel to when a protocol was invented, and compromise the protocol. (Though I guess the NSA can come kind of close to that, by "helping" as it's being developed, w/out the time-travel part.) That's what we're not going to see here.

Ergo, proprietary apps will remain unable to provide secure messaging, but secure messaging will remain available to people who want it.

Comment Re: Leave a little copper out (Score 5, Informative) 49

"Perhaps if it had adequate funding"

LAUSD has about half the number of students they had 20 years ago. They have more than double the number of administrators and about 20 more teachers over that same time scale -- and the budget of LAUSD is over $18 billion -- up from $8 billion 20 years ago. The number of students in that time also went from closer to 800,000 to about 400,000 now.

What this doesn't include are the various city, county and state bond initiatives that added additional funding (which came at increased per dollar spent due to interest on the loans).

The amount of money we're spending is not justified based on the student population. The number of administrators is not justified by student population.

And "oh". Student performance have continued drop.

It's not a funding problem. It's a gross mismanagement problem along wtih turning LAUSD jobs in to "rewards" for both union employees and political supporters.

Slashdot Top Deals

Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must be first overcome. -- Dr. Johnson

Working...