The US refuses to admit it has always had an addiction to cheap labor so it entices desperate people to come over with the implicit assumption that if they keep their head down and are otherwise law-abiding it'll "look the other way." Some of them, after years of living on the outskirts of town, commuting 1.5 hours each day to back-breaking minimum wage jobs, and years without seeing their families, are able to scrounge up enough money to pay a lawyer thousands to help them get normalized. Only now they're being spawn-camped at court hearings too.
If the US were more self-aware and honest it would expand existing guest worker programs and create new pathways for temp labor to work without obtaining citizenship the way Singapore and Middle Eastern countries do. They seem cruel but at least each side of the equation knows what it's getting and they can even visit home every year! But Americans' hubristic tendency is to look at a place like Singapore or some other new skyline in the middle east or Asia and declare smugly "borderline slaves built that."
The only reason we don't reform our work visa programs for cheap labor is because business owners do NOT want to have to pay these people minimum wage, pay taxes on them, or pay to insure them (workman's comp and similar). That's it. That's all there is to it.
As soon as you institute such a program businesses could get sued for illegal labor conditions, abuses of employees, sexual abuse of employees, violations of contract law, and more. Their expenses for imported labor would probably triple.
Would such businesses close as a result? Maybe a handful would but the real impact would be a huge drop in profits—also known as a greater share of profits going to workers.
> Americans' hubristic tendency is to look at a place like Singapore or some other new skyline in the middle east or Asia and declare smugly "borderline slaves built that."
FWIW, I bet the part of the population saying that is also the part opposed to the current immigration enforcement, namely liberals.
add to that food calorie labels arent required to be 100% accurate, there's an acceptable range like +/- 20% iirc. That's enough to throw off a precise deficit. Calorie counting is more about directionally helping you lower your food consumption but it isnt as accurate as people think.
Honestly the main thing was learning that perfectly satisfying food I cook at home tends to land around 600-800 cal for a meal, where eating out almost anywhere is often twice that, even if my beverage is water. Just being aware how how heavy those otherwise delightful meals are gives me pause. Granted these figures are all a side effect of my personal eating habits and preferences, but that's rather the point of the exercise isn't it? There's a lot of individual variation, and the individual is probably best served by a personalized approach.
If I'm smart, I can offset this by eating half of that meal in the restaurant and taking the rest in a to-go container. Two meals for the price of one, and reheating in the oven is almost as convenient.
Separately though, I have no idea why restaurants seem to exclusively offer gigantic portions over here. I wonder how common this is elsewhere in the world? I'm not well traveled so I genuinely have no idea.
These threads tend to devolve into, "Americans are so unsophisticated everyone else in the world is banning cars and turning downtown into walkable utopia" but what they really mean by rest of the world is a few crowded European cities. If you look at all the new rich mega cities built in the Middle East and East Asia cars continue to exist alongside good public transit as aspirational status icons and the preferred means of transit for people who can afford them. Cars are never going away.
There are plenty of cars in Paris and London. It just feels as though people walking are a priority more than they are in NYC. Cars feel compelled more often outside of NYC, where they also block intersections and park next to crosswalks and block visibility.
This is a common misconception. You do have 240V(or 208V in some apartments if we're being pedantic). You primarily use it in the kitchen(range receptacle), laundry, and for your HVAC equipment or an EV charger if you have one.
Someone who knows what they're doing can also add a 240V outlet to any room.
We don't serve 120V to homes, we take 240V and split it. In fact, that's not the only time you use a mix of different voltages. You take that 120V, and then further transform it to 18-24V for things like doorbells and thermostats, or you use a power-brick at the wall to convert it to direct current to charge your laptop, phone, and other items. In none of those use cases would 240V really change your life. It's really only better at boiling water in counter-top kettles. I'm guessing we don't use more 240V kettles because we're not a tea drinking country and culturally people tend to use coffee machines that are "fast enough", but not slow enough to be worth switching over.
> We don't serve 120V to homes, we take 240V and split it.
Ackchyually, we deliver 120V to the poles, not 240V. Then transformers at the poles near the homes split it to two 120V phases, 180° apart. So the difference between +120V and -120V becomes 240V. But the pole wires are still 120V.
>I just don’t get how people are ok with “cheaters” gaming the system.
I usually steer clear of talking about these issues but there's something in the framing of this issue that maga has intentionally made people misunderstand: People do not say "I'm going to risk my life crossing a desert, and then when i have kids I'll be untouchable!" The actual "cheaters" are the birth hotel operators, whose clients are wealthy international elites who fly in while pregnant, then immediately leave to raise their US citizen babies abroad:
These instances of people actually and deliberately cheating the system require a completely separate system of enforcement that does not need to target desperate people who happened to get pregnant over the course of living life and making ends meet and whose children for all intents and purposes will grow up as regular English-speaking Americans who will go to school, work and pay taxes just like everyone else. Immigrants on dual-intent visas(e.g forever h1b but not yet green card), asylum seekers, etc do not get pregnant to "cheat the system".
But the birth hotels are people with money. Think the reich wing cares?
And life happens. The woman that became my wife was here on a temporary visa, life threw us together, our hearts had their own idea about the situation despite both of us mistakenly believing the other was not available. And, no, there's no way she engineered it--the choices that threw us together were all made by others.
Well then it's a good thing historical context matters more than numerical consensus when analyzing why the majority of two continents settled by Europeans in the last 500 years nearly all opted for one broad form of conferring citizenship over another. If you were to redact the name of all 195 countries, but list ten facts about them and draw random names, you could accurately predict which ones will have birthright citizenship just by looking at other properties.
The most aggravating part is it ignores booleans. Sometimes I want to search for very specific things that are variants of hyper-competitive SEO-slop, only without feature x. Like if I want to search for functional lamps that take bulbs (not integrated LEDs). I should be able to search for Lamp -LED without it showing me a thousand led lamps (and upselling me a purchase protection plan when I add to cart. )
I'll humor this patronizing reply chain to add that online shopping, despite its flaws and lack of boolean search, has a better selection and long tail variety than local brick and mortar establishments that all hassle you with warranty protection plan upsells and customer loyalty points anyway. Even the rare shop that can beat Amazon on price and selection, like Microcenter, still tries to guilt trip you with extended warranties and $80 "ram installation" service.
Amazon has infected the minds of lots of people to a point where they'll spend half an hour sifting through garbage listings in their horrible web site and then wait a full day to receive the product, instead of going to the corner store and buy what they know they want.
edit: But I will say it works both ways. Most countries do not know what it takes to keep hundreds of millions of people of various backgrounds together under a common way of life with a certain risk vs entitlement balance. Americans as a whole are more risk tolerant AND accepting of failure and reinventing yourself. In most cultures it's a great shame to quit your job with benefits, start a business and not succeed. In the states it's not shameful. You tried? Awesome.
Speaking of iPhone, Im curious about something. On occasion, I log into the [former] bird app using the web app because it's enough to check up on some key follows.
Recently, they released a major update to their LLM feature and I installed the app to check it out. While I had the app installed, every time I checked the mobile website there was a large banner directing me to go to the app. Ad blockers and distraction blockers would not get rid of it. When I deleted the app again, it was gone. What gives? Why does the mobile website know whether I have the app installed? How come content+distraction blockers are enough to block all reminders to use the app when it's not installed, but are irrevocable if I have the app installed?
>Del. Patrick A. Hope (D-Arlington) said various advocacy groups, including Mothers Against Drunk Driving and the National Safety Council, gave him the idea. He drove a car outfitted with the technology and was impressed. “It was easy to use, and once you’re engaged it’s impossible to go over the speed limit,” he said. “It will make our streets safer.”
How do you reconcile "left lane is for passing, slower traffic keep right" with hard speed limits and speed regulators? I've never found a satisfactory answer besides the German highway system.
Let's say all cars are electronically limited to the speed of the Beltway that goes around Virginia and Maryland in a circle around DC(55MPH). The Beltway has left exits and right exits, as well as merging traffic from the left AND the right. Sometimes you need to get across 2-3 lanes quickly. How do you pass someone going the speed limit enough to create a safe following distance and then merge over in front of them if they are going at exactly the speed limit? Merge behind them instead? What if there's someone behind you and you can't brake?
In the Maryland side of the beltway, wherever there's a hard speed limit enforcement mechanism, i.e speed cameras, cars suddenly slow down when they get to the camera and then floor it as soon as they're out of its range. Locals who drive there every day just memorize the camera locations. The sudden drop in speed from people going 70+ down to camera speed creates a more unsafe situation than if we just allowed people to speed more in the left lane and actually formalized it instead of this wishy-washy gray zone system that depends on law enforcement feeling like pulling you over if you're unlucky or an outlier.
> What if there's someone behind you and you can't brake?
The obvious answer is that you brake, and the person behind you is forced to brake as well. You can always brake.
But knowing how many asshole drivers are out there, what I predict happens next is that the driver behind you decides that you're a moron slowing down for no reason and then gets into the left lane to pass you, putting themselves in the gap that you were planning on going into. They ignored your turn signal (You are signaling, right?) that would have told them that you were getting out of their way.
You don't. It is not legal to exceed the speed limit while passing. There is no such thing as needing to violate traffic laws. There is no such thing as not being able to brake or slow down, regardless of who's behind you. Sometimes it is not possible to cross several lanes in time to make a certain exit, while driving legally. Your legal option is to proceed to the next exit, regardless of whether that makes you unhappy. If driving legally makes you unhappy... that's a YOU problem.
When a majority or plurality of people ignore a law unless a cop or camera is around then maybe it's time to update the law, perhaps by looking to see how other countries or jurisdictions address it. Some countries have higher speed limits, or different per lane speed limits, or have legal "buffers" where they wont enforce(like 10kph over), or explicitly make exceptions for passing.
All of these are preferable to a too slow limit made in a different era with lower safety standards. Im talking about controlled access highways by the way. Not residential or city zones. Those need fewer cars in general.
If the US were more self-aware and honest it would expand existing guest worker programs and create new pathways for temp labor to work without obtaining citizenship the way Singapore and Middle Eastern countries do. They seem cruel but at least each side of the equation knows what it's getting and they can even visit home every year! But Americans' hubristic tendency is to look at a place like Singapore or some other new skyline in the middle east or Asia and declare smugly "borderline slaves built that."
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