Mostly yes. Everyone would also prefer that steel mills semiconductor fabs get built somewhere else, where they personally don't have to deal with any of the externalities.
I don't know why people voted for this. Probably something to do with all the big tech CEOs visibly paying bribes and tribute to the corrupt and massively unpopular president. I doubt the anti-data-center backlash is as extreme without that.
But also just NIMBY. No one likes to live near industry.
To get this big a backlash, you need a variety of reasons to oppose that appeal to a broad coalition of voters. Inevitably some of those reasons will be silly (a lot of people talked themselves into voting for a 2nd term for Trump, after all!).
I was asked once how I felt about the fact that the name I chose for my daughter was primarily used (in America) by Asian immigrants. I noted that they had this impression only because they grew up at the nadir of the name's popularity. It's much more popular now (still not top 50) which means that by the time my daughter is grown up, it will have lost that association, to whatever extent it briefly obtained.
This is also what happened to all those male Ashleys in the 70s. People picked up on the name's trendiness, but didn't initially realize it was vastly more popular for girls and would soon be seen as feminine.
Hilary is an interesting case because, in the data the article is looking at, there are only 5 total years where there were more M Hilarys than Fs: 1936-1941. And even in 1936 the M:F Ratio was only 28:9 (that's not a reduced fraction; the total count was 37). If it's true that Hilary was once a popular boys name, the evidence for that claim is not in the SSA data.
SSA data goes back to 1880, but it's incomplete before 1936 (only counting people who applied for social security after birth). Presumably that's why the article uses 1936 as their data cutoff.
Except it didn't "flip" until 2004. It was also was never really a boys name. In 1990 there were 30 M Aryas and 6 Fs. Prior to 1982 it doesn't occur at all in the SSA data. The very first year that there were more than 100 Aryas total (2002), there were 54 Fs and 79 Ms.
This article misleads by presenting these transitions as from "popular boys name" to "popular girls name", when in fact most of the cases here are from "rare name, sometimes used for boys and sometimes girls" to "suddenly trendy for girls".
To take Ashley as an example. This name suddenly started ramping up in popularity in the 60s. In 1970, there were 927 girls named Ashley in the U.S. It peaked at 54,856 in 1987.
It became notably more popular for boys at roughly the same time! The peak of M Ashley was in 1980, at 746. (Note: it's also very likely that these numbers are wrong. The SSA data also has 56 male Marys in 1980, which is likely the result of coding error.)
Meanwhile, in 1945, solidly in the time period when the article would like you believe that Ashley was solidly a boys name, there were 57 M Ashleys and 10 F. 1950 was 55 M/15 F. Prior to 1960, a "good" year for Ashley was around 100 total babies, with some split of both M and F.
To me, a more honest interpretation of this data is that Ashley was a somewhat unisex, but mostly just very uncommon, name that suddenly became trendy in the 1960s, especially for girls but also for boys.
It did fall in popularity much faster for boys than girls, perhaps as it became to be perceived as feminine due to its popularity for girls. But note that even today, Ashley is still used as a boys name! There were 69 M Ashleys in 2009 and 27 M Ashleys in 2025 (by which point the prevalence of coding error is much lower -- M Mary has fallen out of the data set entirely).
The 2025 F:M ratio of 1829:27 is pretty high, so it's fair to say that Ashley would now read as feminine to many Americans (but note, still less so than Mary). It's much less clear to me that you can conclude from the 1945 M:F ratio of 55:10 that it was once a boys name.
Edit: I noticed that the "How we measured it" notes at the bottom mention this shape for Ashley. But I want to note that it's not unique to that name. Dana, another well-known example of "girls name that used to be a boys name" is very similar. Suddenly trendy in the 40s for both boys AND girls, relatively unisex and uncommon for both prior to that, with usage for boys dropping off relatively quickly as girls' usage continued to rise.
Likewise for Lindsay -- suddenly trendy (this time just for girls) in the 70s. Before then, fairly unisex. 1950 has F:M ratio of 116:97.
This sounded dubious to me, for Ashley in particular. In my genealogy research, it is a common name for men in the southern USA in the mid to late 19th century, and names used to be much more regionally bound. So I checked - I'm seeing about 60k Ashleys in the 1870 Tennessee census, out of 1.2 million people. That is about 5%, higher than Ashley ever got nationally as a girl name at its peak later. But over half of those are labeled female! 35k vs. 25k! Not sure about the data quality in my searches (I am not checking the familysearch transcriptions on tens of thousands of census record scans) but well, I was surprised so I thought I would share.
It is certainly possible that Ashley was once a popular boy name. The point is that, contra the article, there is no evidence for this in the SSA data they have based their analysis on.
I think a lot of these cases would be hard to answer definitively just because we don't really have accurate data more than a century back. And the fact that lots of people will repeat the claim "Ashley used to be a boys name" can be equally well explained by the fact that parents had to say something when their sons asked why they gave them a girl name, and they didn't have the data either.
What is true is that people who named their sons Ashley or Dana or Lindsay, at the time, most likely did not perceive those names as feminine.
My "This" above was vague/ambiguous, sorry. Yes, I only meant, it seemed dubious to me that Ashley wasn't a predominantly boy name, in those times and places where it was actually common prior to the girl peak. (Which was not substantiated by the only data I checked of course.) Your actual substantive points make full sense, cheers.
Also there is a male character named Ashley in Gone with the Wind, which was extremely popular since book release in 1936 and movie in 1939.
You would think there should be a lot of boys named Ashley in the 50s and 60s.
The ICE stuff is extremely unpopular. Most of the people who voted for it did not understand they were doing so. If "the US" is the people, then no, they mostly do not want this. If "the US" is Trump, then yes, it is.
This is also the most important political question in the US right now. Are the people still sovereign?
The issue is that people's idea of illegal immigrants are hardened criminals living a lift of crime, whereas in reality the majority of people that are being deported are normal people that overstayed their visa, ie. the low hanging fruit. So people can be both supportive of the policy but dismayed at the implementation, which is what we are broadly seeing here.
The Harvard-Harris survey linked above asks separately about “deporting immigrants who are here illegally and have committed crimes.” Support for that was at 78% in July.
There was opposition to Noem’s theatrics. But it seems like Mullen’s quieter approach has taken the heat off and most of the focus now is on the shit inflation and Iran war.
"The ICE stuff" means what ICE is actually doing, not some abstract, lawful policy that you could imagine instead. This is precisely the point. Many people who voted for Trump did not understand what they were going to get.
Actual support for Trump's immigration policy and ICE is much lower than you suggest.
Why would anyone be surprised Republicans approve? They voted for it, it was like the main thing they wanted... But despite voting for it still 21% disapprove.
Deporting illegal aliens might be popular as an abstract concept but as soon as the question is about deporting actual people that they know, their opinion changes. It’s great politics to say you’re going to do it, but bad politics and a moral atrocity to _actually_ do it.
The only ethical way to do it is better security at the border and making legal immigration and visits much easier. You can’t just snatch people who are established in communities and put them into camps without leading to a thoroughly justified moral outrage.
I think that it's possible to deport people while still treating them with dignity and respect, without keeping them in horrific conditions, without sending them to random dangerous countries they've never been to, without murdering innocent citizens and non-citizens, and while affording the people you remove legal due process.
Our current president has intentionally created a system designed to be cruel, brutal, and unfair because his supporters get off on it and because every abuse of power makes his next abuse easier, but even though some people will inevitability be upset when the illegal immigrants in their lives are removed from the country, it doesn't have to be a complete moral atrocity to enforce immigration law. The way it's being done today is a choice.
Deporting someone who broke the law is not a moral atrocity. Is it unethical to arrest and jail a bank robber who has established themselves in a community?
These people knowingly and deliberately broke the law, and they continue to deliberately elude enforcement. The problem is that we've been too soft on enforcement, leading to millions upon millions of them assuming they are exempt from the law.
Deporting someone that arrived here 20 years ago, who has a family, whose spouse might be an American citizen, who might have American citizen kids, grandkids, friends, employers, they might own a company and contribute to the economy, etc absolutely is a moral atrocity. Violating border crossing laws is not a crime that is worth upending so many lives. It’s a misdemeanor and the fact that you have to elevate it to a bank robbery to make it seem reasonable tells you everything you need to know. Not all crimes are worth ruining lives over.
I am in favor of deporting people that have not been here long, but there has to be a way to fine people and get them documented after a certain amount of time.
You can say the exact same thing about a bank robber "who has a family, whose spouse might be an American citizen, who might have American citizen kids, grandkids, friends, employers, they might own a company and contribute to the economy".
Entangling yourself into society doesn't absolve you of crimes.
Illegal entry is a felony. Unlawful presence is a misdemeanor which carries the penalty of deportation. Trying to downplay it and liken it to minor infractions tells me everything I need to know.
I am in favor of deporting all illegal aliens. Apply the law equally.
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