@AVincentInSpace @r @munin Well, since I just found that an ex-DEA agent raised $10 million in VC money with provably false background and achievements in conjunction with software that I wrote and maintained on Github for free. The falsehoods can be proven because they do not match up with either OIG's audit on the very issue at the exact time she claimed to have accomplished things that did not occur, cross-referenced with Courtlistener's PACER database. In fact the services advertised on her site would be obtained in a manner that violates the 4th Amendment and kill any case it's involved in. Luckily, there's no docket that indicates that her startup or her was ever involved in any legal proceedings, which was only a handful, and I had RSS feeds on all of them and paid to populate the Courtlistener DB. All this came about from a Bloomberg article that was so outlandishly false that it was obviously a PR plant to rehab ICE-HSI and the DEA's reputation, which is a widely known practice. Except most people don't know this, except I practiced criminal defense and dealt with computer crimes and the DEA a plenty. and so, can do my due diligence between ordering Doordash and the food showing up.

So basically this is, well, potential fraud, which due diligence could have uncovered during a lunch break, but instead have netting ten million dollars of investment into services that literally exist for free and relies on a general lack of technical expertise in criminal law practitioners. Why vibe code when you can just make stuff up, right?

@tinker This sounds A LOT like the justification DHS put out to approve their own (totally illegally in like, multiple ways) not-a-rule-but-absolutely-a-rule to collect social media handles to.. root out... terrorists attempting to enter the country... when the whole system only affects those legally in the country. "Immigration benefits are optional."

Except the biggest chunk of people affected are literally not applying for an immigration benefit. Naturalization is explicitly carved out in the Constitution. All the other stuff is pulled out of someone's ass to keep out first the Chinese and then all non-northern-Europeans 100 years later.

And sure, if you have already finished the I-485 process it's entirely optional to apply for the non-benefit in question, but the other applicants are applying because DHS have insisted on illegally detaining them if they fail to do so with a huge lead time. It would be optional if their liberty interest is optional. Enforcing illegal EOs is also optional. Working for DHS is optional. Except agents had an actual choice that they made to be fascist thugs who repeat the utter nonsense coming out of the White House which accidentally defined foreign terrorist in a way that only Donald Trump seems to fit the entire set of definitions to a tee (thanks to the UK's nationality laws technically making him not someone who can move there but via his mother, the equivalent of what we call being a national). Can't make this stuff up.

@jennycohn.bsky.social At least some of them probably know that it's literally not possible to definitively create a database that can be reliably used to ascertain citizenship, full stop, but explaining that is too much nuance for a population who thinks that to immigrate to the US is just like going to the DMV.

And the others are the type who thinks that immigrating to the US is exactly like going to the DMV and can't imagine anything more complex than that.

And this is somehow their compromise, even though it's certainly unconstitutional in that congress can't delegate authority it doesn't have, and DHS doesn't have a mandate in this area. The almost comically punitive law covering noncitizen voting (no intent requirement, no mistake of fact or law as a defense, 20 years and removal from country) have arguably overdone the work already. The only thing this can even achieve is, well, wasting taxpayer dollar on busywork because 38 trillion in debt as projected is too low.

@ChemicalEyeGuy Thanks. It's not Cooper Union, and actually since the school is effectively defunct, it's Marlboro College, in Vermont. I'm familiar with Cooper Union from my time in New York and was in town when they ditched their tuition free tradition. Working at a public interest firm there were a few alumni who were up in arms for sure, but it looks like they might figure out a way to make it, which is always good to hear. My school is now part of Emerson which, if I ever needed my undergrad transcript for some reason, would entail contacting their registrar. Luckily I doubt that possibility occuring since getting a BA in History and Area Studies from Emerson is kind of incongruous, to say the least. Gone is the 1 on 1 tutorials that make up half of the credits, or the rigors of reading a book a week for each class tutorial. At least the suicides might be less of an issue - the campus being too rural for cell coverage certainly didn't help, I was following my friend in my car when he drove off a deep embankment at full speed and it was a quarter mile walk before I could find a phone, and this was 2006. We were the blank spot on the east coast on Verizon's coverage map.

I think we were an odd duck to just about everyone, even Bennington, with whom we had a sort of rivalry. I have family in Canada - Montreal, but Anglo - and they are all McGill grads who ended up working in finance. We don't talk shop, except the one time I explained to my cousin how the blockchain worked and what it meant in context for people in China who have no real property rights. I actually had a friend whose study abroad program was at UQAM which was a 3.5 hour drive from my campus but with nothing to do in Vermont it was either Boston or Montreal for weekends. It's nice to not have the Francophones make fun of my obviously bad French, and in a complete hipster sense, being able to watch Denis Villeneuve's early works might not be pleasant but definitely an experience. Some things are better learned informally , while others - like every class involving theory at law school - would be a mess, but I'm not sure that the universities quite have the distinction down. I learned statistics entirely through watching sports - mainly baseball - and the advanced metrics that came with it, pre-moneyball. I don't know if it works for exams, but I've had positive returns far beyond the 5-6% minimum while wagering based on information asymmetry and since wagering is a chore, programming follows naturally. On reddit there are CS grads complaining about not knowing how to code but copying and pasting and trial and error and reading the docs worked quite well for me. I don't think these are dumb people, but there's an orthodoxy that they seem to stick to, whereas unless I'm dressed in a suit there's no orthodoxy or prescriptive methods that can't be altered.

I am curious if you also hold office hours and if you do, if students actually show up. The amount of things I've learned at office hours is wild - from the (legally, of course) doxxing of just about anyone in the US to getting a job with just a cover letter to how to bait the other side into a Zugzwang situation. Most of it is just taking notes, but I go to every possible opportunity only to find that I'm literally the only person who ever shows up for some of the courses. That boggles my mind unless... they're not a thing? Just curious, that's all. Cheers.

@ChemicalEyeGuy I would describe LaRouche, by the end of his political life, to be effectively a neo-fascist who labeled himself as a leftist, like the Chinese Communist Party today, except with even more crazy. But like Oswald Mosley, he's simply too ridiculous to gain traction after spending 30 years trying and failing at politicking. Trying to get the Klan vote didn't help either.

But yes, totally agree on the education system failing, really on all levels. After two suicides in two years at my college the administration's plan was to try to force out all who were close to those who passed, and were largely successful - I had to play the race card to stay in (liberal arts college kicking out the only minority would be a story to say the least). The professors were great, but the administration did what I later learned were completely illegal stuff like forcibly checking me into the local mental hospital for a weekend under false pretenses on a Friday night (I used my one phone call to have a friend bring down my homework) and to this day I can't be honest with any therapists. The board then hired a new dean who tried to ingratiate himself by comparing being queer with being a racial minority, forgetting that he could pass and I couldn't and wouldn't pass. Luckily the professors were sympathetic but the school imploded financially and is now the non-art part of an art school, which gifted the school $40 million in endowments. This was during the pandemic and had I been told that it was a possibility I had liqudity to buy the school out but it was done so secretively that nobody knew until it was finalized, and the sale didn't even include the campus itself. It turns out that nearly every successful alumni was banned after grad in a sort of cadaver synod over trivial things like parking violations.

And with that, an institution that for 70 years had its own New England town hall meeting as a governing body, a culture of the really free market, with no GE requirements but a rigorious writing requirement resulting in 30% graduation rate effectively committed suicide. Luckily my old advisor was hired on at the new school. He was an acolyte of James C. Scott (RIP) and had gotten myself into a Narco-state in Myanmar to validate some of his findings when my funding got pulled due to the recession. It's a school for oddballs, selective for those who write but went to learn how to think. It had a lot of Sudbury Valley kids, students taught electives (Intro to Exotic Dance was both practical and rigorous). It had cliques but the student body got along. Hell, I got into the Cato Institute's internship program and nobody batted an eye, although my other advisor's ailing health meant that I took a raincheck and now I sponsor up and coming interns. No surprise that it's the last DC thinktank of the classical liberal variety that did not veer towards Trumpism and instead by staying put it marked the death of fusionism. Who knew principles matter? I did, but will kids in the future?

At age 27 I wrote my first real piece of software and by age 30 I leveraged that into wagering full time on sports - and getting banned from nearly every book in Vegas. With legal training and practice I pulled the free money rug casinos wanted through the administrative law process, which took 4 years. There's a poison pill in the A's Vegas plan - not my implementation, but I badgered the county and state certainly. Direct democracy - and sometimes direct protest by actively refusing to participate - teaches a lot, it turns out, just not job skills. I was asked to leave a Cutco demo. I also worked on 2 capital cases and the jury didn't even convict on either, before I graduated law school. One does not need some fiction to have values, and college should not be a trade school - it makes for a poor one - but it is treated like one, prestige branding and all. And legacy admissions is not inviolable, and treating it as such creates the false zero-sum racial tension that is hypocrtical and unnecessary. Jim Crow and Chinese Exclusion ran almost exactly the same years. Legacy is to keep the old system alive without saying it openly, but for what? I ghostwritten papers for Ivy kids and they were cake. My friends largely went to academia - humanities mostly - and the CIA routinely recruits, and every time they are turned down rudely. Values is not having blood on your hands. Trump went on an execution spree at the end of his reign - not realizing that he had his private army - ICE - and used it to send dissidents to their deaths instead of something worse. By then, scholars at Penn had a point-by-point takedown of Trump's promises: https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3231&context=faculty_scholarship
Will there be more of that? The two parties are reaching for the same solutions out of different rationale, but policy should be a buffet and not omakase. The last two administrations felt similar - actively antagonistic towards millennials, empty gestures, and continuation of bad policies that left no winners. Will anyone speak up this time is anyone's guess, but my gut feel is probably not to the same degree, and nobody will read it. In a prestige-centered system the voices outside of the old-boys club are never going to get their soapbox it seems. We don't live in a binary world, but Trumpian binary thinking have permeated and how that can be reverse remains to be seen.

(sorry I really meant to end this a lot earlier but the first draft of history tends to look like this)