_V_

I don't see the problem.

The last time insurance company tried to BS their way out of the insurance payout, I actually did get the lawyer involved and I successfully got them to admit fault and pay up.

Standing up for myself and doing something IRL feels quite good. You do you.

Do you really believe that you can discharge a debt of $35,000 simply by saying "I don't support Safari" to your creditor? I would not try that tactic with a bank, I can tell you that much.

I would still refuse and force them to send the money through snail mail.

Yeah, for some reason I ran into that issue, too. I'm not giving my governmental ID to some random corporation. If that means I can't use their services, then so be it.

Someone always has to be the first to say "no thanks" to their bs.

Then I save some money and give them to a different company :)

Not gonna happen. Ever.

If a web requires me to do this to access it, I simply refuse.

The last time I needed some web was my electricity company - sent them a ticket with a complaint. They replied with some bs like "your browser is simply not supported" so I kept sending them the same ticket over and over again until I got a real response and it seems they decided to change the system.

To use my favorite quote: That's all it takes really, pressure, and time... :)

Yeah, I have correctly set up robots.txt - if they won't respect that, F them. Bandwidth is not free and I don't mind giving it out to individuals, but I'm not feeding multi-billion dollar companies.

Future is, unfortunately, probably getting back to piracy in some shape or form. Especially with the general idea of the industry that buying something does not mean you own it. In that case all I can say is: F'em.

It is definitely true that piracy is primarily a service problem, not an ethical one.

I'm thinking about the US in the similar manner as the whole EU, and this is probably the source of my misunderstanding.

I'm not surprised by the fact that California has a different politics to for example Florida (I hope I picked good "extreme" cases there ). That is, as you said, very similar to the EU - you have extremely conservative Poland/Hungary and you have very liberal France (for example). But in EU the federal enforcement mostly works through the local governments and is not a completely separate entitiy.

In the EU we really don't have "federal law" in the same manner you seem to have in the US. When the EU passes a law, all states implement it locally (even though the local implementation may vary) and the local law enforcement enforces that law. We don't really have a federal ICE for example, it is always a thing that is handled by the local state. (Well, perhaps there is an official part of the Europol that handles immigration, I have never really heard about it nor have I seen anyone).

We don't have a "federal" EU army, too. Every state has its own armed forces, that are completely independent (well, chain of command-vise) to the others.

Another difference is - as you pointed out - that we are much more densely populated (like 3 times the population density). That's why some of the things we said really surprised me, because you cannot really escape others in the EU. Almost anywhere you go, you are at most 30m by car to some form of "civilization" (for example city/village with working internet and a pub). Btw even though this might be a little bit of an exaggeration, it is not a big one

That was, of course, a little bit of an exaggeration just to paint a picture. And it was not that important to the overall argument, that's why I formulated it so lazily (I wanted to sum things up in few words).

However if we'd go in there, I think there are many people on this side of the argument that really believe/push the extreme version of this. Atleast that's my impression. But since we had for example biological males competing with biological females in strenght-based sports, I'd say this impression is not that inaccurate.

That is, atleast for me personally, an insane thing. Even though I personally fully believe that trans person should be able to live freely their live, I think there are some limitations simply because of that dichotomy and sports are one of those few examples of things trans person should not automatically be able to do and it should be strictly on the case-by-case basis.

But maybe I'm wrong - I'm of course very open discussing other points of view. These sensitive topics are rarely discussed in a civil manner online, so I'd be honestly glad to do so, because I really want to try & understand what drives people on this side of the argument.

Thanks for the clarification! I don't really watch US politics up close that much so this is a new info for me.

But if these things are true, it means that political representation in the US is utterly broken and needs to be somehow re-shaped. I mean the fact that there were attempts to do something for past 20 years and nothing has been done (effectively) is just mad. Right now you seemingly have some kind of status quo, that can be shifted to one side or another through executive orders, right?

That's insane, it seems that after 250 years or so you basically ended up with a crossover of a monarchy and corporatism.

From the outside the congress seems really extremely polarized to me - either extremely conservative people (10 commandments in every classroom, no abortion, no universal healthcare etc) or extreme progressives (no difference between man/woman, cannot tell what a woman is etc). There seems to be no "sane" middle grounds on the US political scene - or atleast it is not visible to the outside.

I kind of feel for you, that actually really sucks. And the worst part is that I personally don't really see any "non-messy" way to change this system because it is controlled by the very people you would need to get rid of in order to make it actually work. And all of them will fight for the status quo, because many of them have been part of the system for so long, that they could not survive by doing anything else.

You can be charged, sentenced and then *released* as an illegal without anyone notifying ICE? Wow, that's wild!

So the federal justice system & laws are completely separate from the local law and one does not talk to the other? I always thought that these things are more interconnected.

In my country I know for sure, that these systems are interconnected so if you are for example checked during a traffic stop, the police officer can immediately see whether you have a valid permit to stay. And if you don't they will immediately arrest you & hand over to the immigration enforcement.

That's what I find so strange as a European - how can you be in country for decades & still function? Like getting a bank account, employment, medical assistance - all of this should be virtually impossible. Or atleast in the Europe it seems to be the case.

Of course, if US did not enforce immigration policies for decades, I can see why people are upset when they suddenly start being enforced. But on the other hand I'd also have to ask, why no government for the past 20 years did not bother to change those laws? I mean if the Democrat party (?) mostly stands for not enforcing these immigration policies, they certailny had their time in power, right?

And without getting into the details about whether deportations are right or wrong, it seems to me that most people that are protesting right now should actually aim their anger on the Democrat party who actually left everyone hanging. This administration (atleast from my "outsider" point of view) just does what they said they will do all along.

Or am I missing something? Thanks for your comment though, I honestly did not know that there was little to no enforcement of these laws for so long.

I have been checked like that as I travel a lot through the Europe. And atleast in my case I just showed them my ID, they ran it through the database and that was the end of it. It sucked, but it was a one-off, so I shrugged it off.

I would argue that deportation is not really a punishment. It is just ejecting you from a place you should not be in the first place - basically a state-operated bouncers. From the perspective of the citizen, I'd want people like that out - for my sake, and their. Because they will create gray economy & not pay taxes. And not only that - since they are in the grey zone of the economy, the people who will employ them can 1) really abuse them as they have no legal/work protections and 2) those companies can get quite a big advantage over other as they have much lower labor costs. Which in turn hurts companies that are employing legal workers, which in turn hurts tax revenue.

Regarding being sent to the active war zones - I always thought that US do have asylums for people esaping from war etc? Meaning those people should be able to get some permit to stay & therefore should not be affected by ICE at all - or is this not a thing in the US? For some reason I thought that this is a part of some kind of international treaty or something, that you cannot deport people who are escaping from war.

Regarding the El Salvador, I read quite a lot about CECOT and about (recent) history of El Salvador and to be frank, I totaly get why the people in El Salvador chose to do what they did. The amount of atrocities that local gangs were commiting was incredible and given the sheer amount of the gang members and their violence, there is really nothing "human" you can do. Granted, I have not visited El Salvador, so my information may not be 100% correct, but right now I shed no tears for the gang members in their gulags. We really are not talking about people that you can reason with.

I knew US states were partially sovereign, but I always thought that federal laws are applied country wide & are enforced like that on all levels. And the local laws are on top of those. I did not know that the local police does not/should not enforce federal law I thought that if you commit something like wire fraud, local police will be working with the FBI to catch you. But as far as I understand it, local police is not really involved in those deportations, right? I always saw ICE agents (= federal) running around & rounding people up.

Thanks for the comment & explanation