Initiateofthevoid

Thanks! Try not to let it get you down. It's less a Lovecraftian horror and more like a giant Rube Goldberg-Plinko machine that got way out of hand.

You are correct, and ultimately the issue is that the laws shouldn't be different for immigration courts or immigration agents, because wrongful detention or deportation can be worse than wrongful imprisonment.

Most office workers move things from point A to B in the physical, digital, or financial world. Electricity, toys, real estate, insurance contracts, missiles, you name it. The office worker is a link in a chain of information that stretches from the beginning of causality to the final effects of human existence.

There's a mine, somewhere in the world. In that mine is metal. A factory owner wants that metal. Office workers for that factory call or email the office for that mine, and ask for that metal. The two offices negotiate a deal.

This usually involves calls or emails to management, accounting, sales, legal - all different office workers doing different things - that ultimately boil down to:

1. agreeing to a price per unit of metal (+ applicable taxes) that can benefit both parties, and
2. logistics of when and how to deliver or pickup that metal, and how much those logistics cost.

From there, it's pretty much the same deal. The factory isn't making enough money. They want to sell a better product. Office workers for the factory contact other office workers at an engineering firm. Both parties make calls, send emails, design proof-of-concepts, and they negotiate a deal. Sometimes they logon to an hour-tracking software, so an office worker can bill the factory per hour another office worker spent working for that factory's product.

A major importer wants the product that the factory made with that engineer's designs and that mine's metal. Office workers make calls, send emails, check tariff and tax regulations, contact representatives at the port or border, schedule times and dates, and negotiate a deal.

A major retailer wants the product that the importer purchased from the factory.....

A consumer buys a product and dies. Their family hires a lawyer. That lawyer has his office workers make calls, send emails, logon to government websites, and schedule hearings and submit documents to prove that the product killed the consumer.

An insurance agency investigates the plaintiff that is suing the retailer. They google the person that died. They contact office workers that know about how people die or know about how products can kill, and they check the insurance company's database for how often people die to that product, and they calculate the odds that the product will kill a person, and then insurance office workers renegotiate a contract with the retailer office workers for higher premiums.

An office worker in the government works for the court. They receive the lawsuit documents, they make and cancel appointments, make phone calls and send emails to other office workers, lawyers, or plaintiffs, they send data from one lawyer to another, etc.

The whole system builds and builds until you have office workers talking to office workers talking to office workers about the movement of imaginary assets that never actually move, or the buying and selling of personal data for targetting ads that everyone hates, or software engineers building cryptocurrencies designed to fail or call centers that exist only to convince you to pay them money, or tax filing software companies that only exist because they pay the government to make tax filing hard...

And there, everywhere, in everything - you have the modern day office worker.

TL;DR: Reading emails. Sending emails. Checking data. Making data. Moving data. Making phone calls. Signing contracts. Approving decisions. Buying, selling, loaning, stealing, hiring, firing, murdering, perjuring, harassing, gassing, lying, crying, building, destroying - all pixels on a screen and voices on a phone, text in an email and words in a voicemail, all the world's wealth and all the world's future moving piece by little intricate piece from one human to the next in an impossibly vast network of causality that nobody really understands or controls but nonetheless keeps rolling forward one dollar at a time.

(Edit - oh, and don't even get me started on websites, apps, and spreadsheets that they use to interface with the data. There are infinite monkeys at infinite computers making the most randomized bespoke solutions to every little business niche, and every office worker has to swap between 2-6 of them on the daily)

It'll be hard to spot but easy to follow. But the drone and the wire don't need to go in a straight line. Anything could be waiting on the route between the operator and the drone.

Oh absolutely. Perhaps "necessarily" isn't the right word. But the point is that even if you were somehow perfectly neutral (or worse, supportive) toward this horrifying shift in geopolitics, you still wouldn't want to invest in the US dollar.

Of course it's not strange. It's not even necessarily retaliation! It's just smart business. The US is not reliable or stable, and the dollar is not reliable or stable. Neither are good investments right now.

(Maybe someone on F-droid could get on that?)

Seconded! I read and thought the same things, something like that would be huge right now. Hell of a time crunch and hostile work environment, but it could save a lot of lives.

Easily the most underrated moment of the election was when the sofa-king Shady Vance said that the US has the "cleanest energy economy in the world." On stage! On television!

That's not even revisionist, it's just straight double think. Decades of holding the nation back in an outdated dirty energy economy, from Reagan ripping solar panels off the white house roof to Trump ripping EV chargers out of federal parking lots.

Decades of fighting any and all clean energy initiatives and they just... pretend it never happened. Gaslit the country into thinking that we already accomplished all of the progress that they personally prevented. The progress that we still desperately need to this day.

It's time for ICE to leave NY. Hochul and the other governors need to pull the trigger and outright ban the agency from operating in the state. The fed is already pulling funding across the board for state programs and dismantling the agencies that keep states running when a crisis hits. All of the carrots are gone and Trump is waving his sticks around for no fucking reason anyway. Innocents are being taken off the street and students are being harassed and expelled.

Yes, there's probably nothing to legally give her that power, but there's nothing legal about any of this.

But what you can’t do is tell them not to say it.

... lol. That's not how freedom works. I can tell them whatever I want. That's how freedom works. But go on with your freedom. Go use the N word like that on the streets of a major city, we'll see how you hold up with that half-assed ideal when people rightfully tell you to stop.

It's sort of like telling someone who smokes, that it’s bad for them, they know, you don’t need to remind them.

If a famous celebrity tells people that smoking is good for them, should that go unchallenged?

Right... we're all here in this thread because Joe Rogan says we should say the word. That it's good for our culture. I'm suggesting that we probably shouldn't say the word. That it's bad for our culture.