techsupporter

> ... I'm old ... you can live life without holding a cellphone all the time. It's not as hard as you think.

I'm in my 50s and I don't know where this stance comes from. Sure, you physically can in the same sense that anywhere can be walked to if you're willing to walk long enough. But so many businesses and services have gone "mobile-first" or "mobile-only" to the point that if you're traveling for leisure you're doing extra work on your vacation, and if you're traveling for business you're wasting time that could be used doing your job. Just as a first order, the denizens of every airline subreddit will tell you that the most useful tool during a trip is the airline's mobile app and that's either tied with or just above or below the Flighty app if anything goes wrong.

Combine that with QR codes for everything from menus to parking, public transit tickets and fare cards that can be easily loaded into a phone instead of using a ticket machine made when we were kids, or paper maps increasingly hard to find if they're available at all, and you're looking at a real challenge. How are you going to talk to and plan with your travel partner or colleagues with payphones removed?

It's also not incumbent upon us to make the government's life easier by making our lives harder. "Just leave your phone at home" is ludicrous behavior to expect when it's the government being the intrusive jerks.

> low quality network participants are joining

(Genuinely curious because I truly don't know in this context) What is a low quality network participant? One of the "bulletproof" hosts?

> A birth certificate is just a piece of paper so that's a bit of a red herring.

No, it isn't. Birth certificates are how we have proven citizenship in the United States almost since the founding of the Republic.

> ...an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship—including a birth certificate—if the app says the person is an alien...

What law gives ICE permission to ignore a document created through the authority of a co-sovereign government of our federal system? Responsibility for recording of births and deaths falls to the several States. If my state has issued a birth certificate documenting the fact of my birth, that is it per the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.

ICE is not a court; they do not make determinations of law. If I have a birth certificate or, even more arguably, a passport then that beats whatever cooked up bullshit ICE is spewing from a mobile device. ICE is not a prosecutor; they do not decide who has faked documents or who has real ones.

People need to stop apologizing for ICE vastly overstepping what they are permitted to do in their haste to become an internal secret police.

> Everyone follows the same rules at the airport.

All travelers do but all border inspection people do not. Or if they do, they apply their discretion very unevenly in some Very Interesting Ways.

I've watched it happen twice since COVID, both times traveling abroad for work and coming back into the United States with coworkers (different coworkers each trip) who are not nearly as pale as I am. Neither of us had Global Entry or anything like that back then. Both times, I got waved through with barely a glance and my US-passport-holding coworker got grilled. "Where do you live", "why did you go on this trip", "who do you work for", and so on.

To reiterate: All of us are citizens, all of us were born here, and we were taking the exact same trips at the exact same times coming back with the usual things you take with you on a business trip.

Anecdotes from friends who are darker than a sheet of printer paper tell me this situation has not improved.

I’m not sure what your criticism is?

Ars is reporting on a legal case and also on people who say they will be harmed by that case. The reporter then goes on to detail the policy work that groups are doing to try to change copyright laws in the country.

What else would you like to see? A legal analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the case?

Does it have an in-frame modal that pops up immediately after page load to beg me for my email address?

What about an embedded video window that covers the bottom 2/3rds of the content and follows with scroll?

Oh and I hope you've not left out the absolutely mandatory "Read More" button that spawns a user interaction and auto-plays everything on the page.

Those are all of my favourite things on the web and I really enjoy seeing them all over the place!!

My niece was born deaf and her parents went the opposite direction: they chose not to have her get an implant because of the risk of surgery at such a young age and being fortunate to live in an area with a sizable deaf community. They took ASL classes (my spouse and I joined them) and she’s now enrolled in a mix of ASL and English interpreted classes.

I agree that people can only make the decision with what they have at the time. After watching her grow up these last several years, her parents think they made the right choice.

> And communicating specialized stuff like technical programming is not possible, gestures only cover basic words.

I want to gently push back on this. While sign languages do have signs for common, “basic” words (ASL has a lot of 1:1 mapped signs for English), sign languages are languages. They can, and do, express “specialized stuff”.

I have two coworkers who are deaf and they absolutely communicate specialized medical and technical concepts to each other and other people who use sign language. It’s amazing to watch them sign to each other, as someone who is only intermediate at ASL.

> If the law is vague, it is the duty of the judiciary to call that out and of the legislature to rewrite the law to be more precise.

Why? Nothing in our Constitution requires precise laws. Arguably (and since I'm making it, I'll say I'm in favor of this argument), the Constitution would preclude overly strict laws because the Executive is a co-equal branch of government.

> Vague laws are not an excuse for executive agencies to go ham, and I applaud the judiciary for reining in executive abuse of power.

Why not?

Congress has the authority to pass the laws it sees fit. Why is it suddenly a problem that Congress passed a law that says "the agency known as the Federal Trade Commission is established and the President, through a set of commissioners appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, shall ensure that the these list of goals are accomplished and shall establish such rules as the Commission deems appropriate."

We aren't a parliamentary system. The Congress has the power of the purse and the power to enact laws. The President has the power to implement the laws and to spend the money.

What's changed in recent years is the judiciary has come along and decided that a hundred years of Congress writing laws with bullet-point goals and the President acting under those laws is no longer relevant because "Congress didn't write enough words." That's not how textualism works.

> People's expectations were that pensions would be replaced by 401ks, and retirement could start at 65.

And that's kind of the rub: I don't think people's expectations were that 401k plans would replace pensions; I think employer's expectations were this and the individual worker was sold a false bill of goods.

From what I know (I wasn't economically active when this change happened), the original push for 401k plans came from a desire to lessen the taxable earnings of highly-paid bank executives when we had a much higher top margin tax rate in the United States. As there's also no requirement that employers match employee contributions to 401k--or that matched contributions be available to the employee immediately--employers could almost overnight relieve themselves of the "burden" of pension contributions.

(Not that pensions are, especially today, some magic elixir. Look at how many pensions have had to go to the public assistance well after they were either mismanaged, undercontributed, or both/more by the sponsoring employer.)

Thus we've wound up in this system where, like many things in the US, everyone loses except the people who got there first (or the people who are already very well-resourced).

Generally speaking, with caveats like always exist in life:

If you're roughly 65 or older, you probably held at least one job where you have an employer pension so that plus Social Security means you're probably doing pretty well.

If you're roughly 50 or older and in a union, you have the same thing but with a smaller pension proviso, assuming you weren't able to (and didn't, if you were able to) buy out your pension into a 401k.

People late 40s to 50s are about the age where they lost the benefit of pensions and are fully on the hook for savings if or when they want to stop working but didn't get the full run of having a 401k. They will be looking largely to Social Security and hope.

People in their early 40s to 30s and younger are asking what they're being taxed for and are facing a job market where even more jobs are piecework or lack benefits, alongside massive hikes in the costs of living where there are jobs so saving is even harder.

Yet somehow a US worker is more productive than ever. Those gains are all going somewhere, and it looks like we're all slowly figuring out where...and as a society we don't like it.

It's also not a government web site. It's a private company who, for some reason, my own government outsources identity verification to. Meanwhile, the authorization system the US government has built (login.gov) is deemed "insecure" by the IRS and Social Security for some inexplicable reason. (But it's fine for Trusted Traveler Programs.)

Most credit unions participate in the credit union shared branching network, so I recommend joining your local credit union of choice. You can then go into the branches of several other credit unions to do most banking needs.

The caveat is if there's a major problem, like here, then you'd need to deal directly with your home credit union.