Of course it's illegal. But it used to be open season on the US border was the point. There were so many crossings, this dude would have gone unnoticed. Carrying or not. Nowadays not so much.
I crossed the border from Mexico into the USA towing a large trailer a few weeks ago and was waived right across with no questions or inspections. All that has changed recently is an uptick in racial profiling at the border.
You crossed legally. You didn't swim or walk through the desert.
They have xray scanners, dogs, and many other methods to inspect vehicles. You may not have even noticed you were inspected.
Nothing racial about it, many races from many nations crossed illegally. It's about legality, not race.
No, the scanners and imaging equipment do not fit large trailers like I was towing, so I had to bypass all of the equipment to a manual inspection area, but then they waived me through.
Racial profiling - as well as other types of profiling - are absolutely a major factor in US border enforcement, and are currently done openly and legally. Your odds of being extensively searched are astronomically higher if you are crossing legally but have an accent or darker skin tone. ICE and border patrol openly use racial profiling, and recently won a supreme court case Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo allowing them to continue doing so. They wouldn't fight all the way to the supreme court and win for the right to racially profile people if they didn't even do it!
Moreover, the job of a border agent, especially under the current administration actively seeks out and recruits employees that are attracted to the idea of a career that allows and encourages xenophobia, bullying, and racism. Sadistic people like Greg Bovino, who revels in fascist imagery and illegal brutality rise to top leadership positions. The recruitment materials for these jobs use white nationalist and white supremacists imagery and slogans- often using images stolen verbatim from white supremacist websites and forums.
I think that’s the same idea behind clicker training for dogs. There’s a delay in giving them the actual treat, but the instantaneous click sound lets them now they did the thing that results in a treat
not pavlov conditioning -- in Skinner's three term contingency, the stimulus context acquires meaning/significance related to the consequences of a response. a neutral or even negative stimulus (context) can become it's own reward through this process. this conditioned stimulus explains most animal and human experience. Humans are especially prone to constructing meaning based on the primal.
Think of the senses: sound becomes talking, music, etc. food become cuisine, obesity, and anorexia. eyes becomes art, movies, etc. desire becomes porn, s@m, etc.
meaning is constructed, socially constructed, or what skinner call "learning." His masterwork, long forgotten, is the "generic nature of stimulus and response." Generic as it open to near total manipulation
I can see both sides of the dilemma and I don't necessarily like when a maintainer defaults to "open a PR" but asking for a reproducible issue wherever requested is not too much to ask.
With a PR I understand not wanting to put the effort in as it may not be merged. But offering up a reproducible example on the correct forum is the least you could do. If you want the problem fixed that's the best way forward.
People can pay a 10-20% premium for African and Dutch gifts if they want to.
Or shop American and help keep manufacturing and jobs alive here.
I think it's a fair compromise. As Americans we are used to having an overwhelming amount of choice, partly due to our previous open trade policies. Something you don't really see in other countries. Go to Japan and you can count the American products sold on your hand.
> Go to Japan and you can count the American products sold on your hand.
I'm living on Japan right now and this is absurd. There are American brands everywhere (although as usual who knows where the products are made). American food brands. American steak. American sportswear. American backpacks. Entire shops in the mall devoted to American fashion. I'd say appliances and cars are more rarely American brands but there are reasons beyond trade barriers why that's true.
Lived there for 6 years. You're not buying American steak, most likely it's Australian.
There are certain clothing brands (at a much higher cost), large fast food chains, and Apple are the exceptions. Basically really large companies that make specific deals.
Just checked my local grocery store circular, and as you can see (upper left) they sell American pork, at least. I believe I have bought American steak but it's not on sale at the moment.
For food items, the import regulations are much stricter in every country than for stuff like electronics or clothes. Meat especially is very highly restricted, due to differences in feeding, antibiotics, etc...
And how are "large companies" making deals? The same import duties apply to everyone.
taking an example from the article, the USA currently produces 0.2% of coffee it consumes domestically (Hawaii and Puerto Rico).
Could coffee be grown in reasonable quantities inside the USA? I find some mention of very expensive high-end 'boutique' coffee grown in California but it is not generally a crop that grows well in the continental USA.
(until global warming reduces the chances of frost in Florida perhaps?)
Another example from the article was a tea grower. Again, niche growing is limited to just some regions of the USA, with less than 0.1% of consumption domestically produced.
And of course with these products they have distinctive tastes that reflect where they were grown, so tea from California is distinctive tasting and not a direct substitute for tea from Japan from the article.
The growers in the article had been heavily disrupted by tariffs.
That's a strawman. Obviously if there's no American competition then I see no problem with lower tariffs for those products.
I don't mind at all reducing tariffs for things we dont manufacture or can't for various reasons.
I believe the administration is lowering tariffs for things like that.
Beef on the other hand should be temporarily lowered since our cattle herd is half of what it should be. (It plummeted under Biden takes awhile to return as the herd matures) Soooo import from Argentina until it's back up.
>Or shop American and help keep manufacturing and jobs alive here.
This kind of myopic view completely misses the scope of manufacturing chains that are simply missing in the US. Things like stainless steel rebar and LCD screens take many years to build up efficient production for.
>Go to Japan and you can count the American products sold on your hand
Do you honestly think that Japan makes almost everything domestically? There's a good reason for the absence of American products in Japan. You are so close :)
I don't buy many American products because whenever I've tried in the past, the quality, and customer service has been shoddy. Americans can't assemble things correctly, ship wrong or obviously defective products, fail to fill in customs forms properly, and then expect me to just shrug my shoulders and accept all that rather than acknowledging issues and trying to fix them.
I realise that my experience is limited to the handful of times I've tried to buy stuff from the US. Perhaps I've just been very unlucky, but frankly, the odds are against it.
It is. Japanese don't have the opportunity to buy most American products. You won't see them stocked or available apart from import stores where prices can be 2-3x the price they are in America due to import fees. Many items aren't even available there due to strict restrictions. Meanwhile America has been an open market for a long time.
My point isn't that American products aren't expensive to import into Japan (I don't know). My point is that even if they weren't expensive to import into Japan, what American products would you even import? Most stuff is not made in America in the first place.
That can be true, but that doesn't mean it was manufactured in America. More often it means it was either labeled, packaged or assembled in America. But the supply chain does not end where you buy a finished product.
Or shop American and help keep manufacturing and jobs alive here.
Or you know, drive us into a recession. You do recall tariffs (Smoot-Hawley) were a contributing factor to the length and depth of the Great Depression, right?
Steam power is no joke if you actually look at the numbers. At this scale, it lets you move energy around and convert it to electricity in fewer steps, with fewer losses, than any other strategy.
We are still trying to solve the problem that we can't keep the plasma hot long enough to create fusion energy, so working on exotic conversion schemes is one step too far.
Consider also how complex these reactors already are, it makes sense to use the simplest method that we know works well.
Makes sense, but from a layman perspective it seems like introducing additional complexity and lots of inefficient, high-loss transmission steps.
We start with detached electrons moving at high speeds (plasma). We want detached electrons moving at moderate speeds (electrical current). And yet, the intermediate steps involve everything from heat, steam, large-scale mechanical forces and magnetic induction, just to get back to the electrons?
It feels more like the "pull in a 500MB framework instead of writing the function yourself" kind of simplicity.
There are lots of ideas, like using a reverse cyclotron (a particle decelerator) to drive a turbine, or harnessing the photo-electric effect (essentially solar panels, but for x-rays).
I'd like to see metrics on that. But intuitively I'd say AI is faster.
Basically it's opening the tab and typing your thought vs speed running paint.
@sandermvanvliet what was the process and how long do you estimate it took you?
Personally it would take me awhile to find the template, the exact font and get the positioning just right.
I could make a crude one fast, and I've seen many crude versions of this meme. But matching the font is a bit more work, maybe there's a generator for it, but that's not paint nor do I know where it exists.
“Speed running paint”? You mean opening the image and dragging a text box over the existing text, changing the font to comic sans, and typing the text?
There are complicated workflows in Paint, this is not one of them.
Why have you failed though? Is the point to try to deceive people to think that XKCD actually published something else? Why not modify the xkcd one without hinding the fact that you modified it?
Of course it's illegal. But it used to be open season on the US border was the point. There were so many crossings, this dude would have gone unnoticed. Carrying or not. Nowadays not so much.