561–570 of 986 posts
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I lose points every time I criticize Noam Chomsky. Who are the other sacred cows on HN that if you criticize you automatically lose Karma? I'll take a stab: Noam Chomsky Paul Graham Elon Musk Jeff Bezos
That wasn't a criticism. It was a short, sarcastic jeer with poor grammar.
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Just because I'm not hysterical about the TSA doesn't mean I can't comment here. When you travel by air, you are cramming yourself into a small metal tube with 300 other people. The other 299 people want everyone there to be checked for weapons, so the government does this. If you want to be able to travel without being screened, there are tons of options available to you. But the reality is, you have no right in the…
Genuinely hope you get hellbanned for this. If the HN moderators apply the same standards to you as they do to everyone else you should be.
And like jrockway said, he is somehow on the leader board. That probably ought to mean something.
The last part really got me thinking, when the author mentioned that his apartment was probably searched by some agency. He would obviously have noted if he had received some sort of notification that his apartment had been legally searched. Is it legal for the police, the DHS, FBI or any other agency to search your apartment and belongings without notifying you? Are there warrants that will let the authorities do th…
I am not a lawyer, but this is how I understand it: Hypothetically if they had issued a FISA warrant to the landlord, then the landlord could have let them search the apartment and additionally would not be legally allowed to inform his tenet that a warrant had been issued [1], must less that his apartment had been searched. 1. http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/1861 see part (d) "Nondisclosure"
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As above, what would you do if someone set off an explosives detector? I pat them down, and search their luggage. If I don't find a bomb, I let them go. It should take 3-5 minutes, tops. What I don't do is detain them for hours, grille them over and over again, and deny them food and water during the detainment. but at the same time they need to be persistent enough to deal with the attempts of guilty parties to conc…
> I pat them down, and search their luggage. If I don't find > a bomb, I let them go. It should take 3-5 minutes, tops. He had checked luggage.
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> I imagine the only worse thing I could be is an Iranian nuclear scientist. I would like to think such a person would have no problem coming, but just wouldn't be allowed to go back.
This is what I find surprising about security checks, don't quite understand. When I entered Israel I was out hailing a cab within minutes of debarking my flight. When I was leaving, they had me detained and searched thoroughly. I couldn't understand why they let me enter in the first place if I was such a suspect personality.
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> The only way the people take this country back is to start a third party. If a party was started, it wouldn't be a third party, it'd be something like a fortieth party, excluding strictly regional parties. The reason additional parties aren't competitive is structural in the electoral systems used in federal and state elections, and adding more parties isn't going to change that.
Exactly. So you have to go back yet another step and look at who has power to change the electoral system. You might think the only answer is a constitutional amendment, which requires a supermajority of Congress, but in fact there's a backdoor: if you have the cooperation of a majority of state governments then you can certify any electors you like. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstat...…
For most elections (including most changes to election rules for federal offices), the correct answer is "the legislature (and sometimes the people directly, by initiative, to the extent that they have reserved legislative power) of the state in which the election occurs." This includes, incidentally, most of the procedures surrounding elections for the state's slate of Presidential electors in Presidential elections, as well as most of the rules for elections for most other offices.
There are some mandated aspects of the setup of elections for federal office (e.g., single member districts for Congress) that are set through federal law and require Congressional action to permit changes.
There are a few non-mandated-guidelines aspects of the setup of some elections for federal office (e.g., the safe harbor rules for the conduct of Presidential elections) that likewise involve Congressional action, but, as these are not mandates, states can change them without federal action, but there might be greater risk of Congress disqualifying the electoral votes of those states (but since the safe harbor rules are rules governing purely discretionary Congressional acts, its not clear that Congress would actually be barred from discounting electoral votes based on elections which complied with the safe harbor rules, and in any case its not clear that they actually would bar votes based on elections which didn't.)
There are very few aspects of federal elections that are governed by the Federal Constitution (e.g., that elections to the Presidency are by way of the electoral college and how electors are apportioned among the states, etc.)
> You might think the only answer is a constitutional amendment, which requires a supermajority of Congress
You might, if you have absolutely no idea about election law in the US, and have compounded that ignorance by only paying attention to one of the two methods of amending the Constitution specified in Article V, and, on top of all that, only considered Presidential elections.
> but in fact there's a backdoor
Or, rather, a whole lot of obvious, clearly marked, wide-open front, back, and side doors, windows, cat-and-dog doors, etc., as described above.
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What's her experiences with Kazakhstan exactly? I've never been there but would expect from any post-soviet country a great deal of nobody caring about you and not many secret police anywhere.
The ex-soviet central Asian republics are packed full of secret police -- until 2006, Turkmenistan boasted one of the world's most famous totalitarian regimes under his Amazingself-for-life President Niyazov, and although his successor has made some reforms, things haven't gotten much better since Niyazov's death. The other republics share the same kind of government to a greater or lesser extent. IWPR at http://iwpr…
Tajikistan is different as the president's power is somewhat limited the further away you go from the few important cities.
Don't know much about Kazakhstan, but I suspect it's more or less like Uzbekistan.
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As above, what would you do if someone set off an explosives detector? I pat them down, and search their luggage. If I don't find a bomb, I let them go. It should take 3-5 minutes, tops. What I don't do is detain them for hours, grille them over and over again, and deny them food and water during the detainment. but at the same time they need to be persistent enough to deal with the attempts of guilty parties to conc…
> I pat them down, and search their luggage. If I don't find > a bomb, I let them go. It should take 3-5 minutes, tops. He had checked luggage.
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I'm not sure if you understand what "profiled" means. He was pulled into questioning because he repeatedly set off the bomb detector. The questions about race/religion weren't profiling, because they weren't used to select him for additional scrutiny. They are part of a psychological battery designed to evaluate him without a harsh interrogation. These sorts of batteries were pioneered by the Israelis and are very ef…
An FBI agent in the article: "You’ll have to understand, when a person of your… background walks into here, traveling alone, and sets off our alarms, people start to get a bit nervous. I’m sure you’ve been following what’s been going on in the news recently. You’ve got people from five different branches of government all in here - we don’t do this just for fun." That's profiling. Edit to add: in other words "The que…
nervous = background && companions && alarm
The FBI agent did not say "You are being subjected to additional screening because of your background and because you're traveling alone". That they are nervous because of his background and lack of companions is orthogonal to the fact that the additional screening happened because of the positive match for explosives.
Or are you suggesting that if a white person traveling with companions matched positive for explosives, that they wouldn't be subjected to additional screening?