About 0%. China really has no serious interest in Greenland, and Russia isn't going to trigger direct confrontation with NATO. At least, unless NATO splinters, which is looking somewhat likely now with this foolish US administration.
Russia and China are just made-up excuses for Trump to do what he wants to do: steal territory, at gunpoint if needed.
I just cannot stomach the number of people who apparently value nothing except displays of performative cruelty and childish tantrums.
There's been a significant shift of an "ow-I-touched-the-stove" variety towards sanity among independents, but it's a Problem that some significant double-digit percentage of the nation just plain likes this violent self-destructive flailing, and will reward anything as long as it makes them feel like somebody is getting hurt.
I'm sympathetic to the position that a lot of people just didn't pay attention before voting in the '24 election and voted purely off of some incomprehensibly puerile vibes, but the complete apathy I'm still seeing is equal parts profoundly tragic and utterly crazy-making.
Even if the US backs down, the transatlantic coziness that's felt like a permanent fixture all my life is just gone. And if we don't back down, God help everybody.
All it took was a white mother (and US citizen) getting shot in broad daylight. As much as I hate to admit it, a large enough segment of the population needed something blatant like this to care.
There's such a long list of things one could say that about.
In this instance the "representation matters" thought process seems to bear out.
Folks talk about aspiring to role models who look like them. People also react strongly when this sort of thing happens to someone who looks like them.
The problem is that you can slice representation every which way. It could be "I only identify with 6'3" males who live in Idaho and like trains", or it could be "I identify with humans".
The fact that US culture chooses to identify with people of the same colour is telling, though I don't know, maybe that's a human thing and my country is too homogeneous for me to think otherwise.
It's not. I was a "90 day fiance" immigrant (the concept, not the show).
We had a sincere relationship, but we both agreed that our marriage, while genuine, was earlier than it would have otherwise been other than logistics of an trans-Pacific romance.
We stayed together 5 years, then separated/divorced, amicably. In the midst of all that I missed a USCIS filing date.
I was out of status briefly, but also in a situation where I was ostensibly entitled to stay (USCIS would have to demonstrate a belief that the marriage was under false pretences), so I hired an immigration attorney to straighten things out (which basically involved filing paperwork that I needed to file, and a letter from her and one from me explaining why I missed it.
She did make the comment to me during all that though that I had no cause for concern above and beyond that, quote:
"I hate that I can say it, but the reality is you're both 'the right color' and a high-earning male. USCIS has you so far down the list of their priorities for reconciliation you could stay here decades before them calling you to account".
Most K1 applications are approved, most are female, most are not white.
I doubt your case would have been any different had you not been a "'the right color' and a high-earning male".
She wasn't referring to K1 visas specifically, she was referring to USCIS and how they'd prioritize dealing with enforcement actions against people in non-compliance with their visa obligations.
And I'd suspect as an immigration attorney, she likely had first-hand experience of same.
Would be unlikely that the USCIS radically changed their approach when dealing with paperwork messups for populations if these different countries while apparently approving applications at basically the same exact rate.
You're not understanding. This has nothing to do with the K1 visa. Or approval rates. I came from a low risk country.
This is about adjustments of status, for any visa, and people who fall out of compliance and are in a period of being "unauthorized" to be/stay/work in the country.
And sorry, given ICE's mandates, ruled temporarily okay by SCOTUS, that color of skin, accent, name are effectively "probable cause" for detention, I'd say her perspective is absolutely aligned with current enforcement priorities.
I think you are not understanding me. My contention is adjustments of status snafus isn't going to be much different than K1 approval rates in terms of how people are treated. It seems by the numbers, people are treated the same as it relates K1 whether they come from a "right skin color" country or not. Why is that going to be wildly different when it comes to minor issues?
I wonder what conclusion the FBI's investigation will come to because it sure doesn't look good for ICE to me. Best case, those two agents get sentenced to life for murder but the damage is done and a life taken. If the officer fired two shots and she died at the scene then it seems reasonable to me the bullets didn't go through the windshield and, instead, went through her rolled down window while she was turning away from the officer. If that's the case then I'm predicting riots everywhere over the next couple weeks.
// i know pretty much zero details of what happened and it will be impossible to get any actual facts that are not politicized for weeks
Given that this administration appointed the head of the FBI due to his loyalty to Trump, the most likely reason they took over the investigation is to shield ICE from any accountability.
The US FBI now seems to act much as the National Enquirer does, as a "catch and kill" tool.
In the case of the Enquirer, this was through buying exclusive rights to inconvenient stories and refusing to publish them. In the case of the FBI, it's by claiming exclusive jurisdiction over incidents and quashing or impeding independent investigation.
Trump watched the video in front of a bunch of reporters and said "meh". Nothing will change for 3.5 years minimum. 40% of the country thinks he's doing great, and a greater percentage of those 40% vote vs the people who vote from the other group.
The only way elections will change anything is if the Senate flips to 2/3 control by the Dems. I doubt enough GOP will vote to convict to reach 2/3. So even if a 51% House impeaches, it will go no further. We've already seen this scenario. Twice.
Are they now? If so, where is the carefully nuance bio of Good? Why do I get choreographed and weirdly aligned responses from various online profiles ( my 'observer' note )? The answer is obvious: there are points to be made by strategically aligning her verious 'more than one thing' portions of persona to match a narrative, which, but I repeat myself, is very, very tiring.
I don't know, I don't think it's normally assumed that when someone dies (or more to the point is murdered) in a very public way we all immediately deserve to know every thing about them.
I don't know what you're talking about really. What I mean to say is the rest of this comment is incoherent to me.
BS. And I do not say this lightly. When it fits a given narrative, media has no issue or qualms in publishing anything and everything related to a given person they find online. It is only when they selectively release it over days that you just know how well the person does not fit the script, as it were.
She can be both, she will become lots of things over time depending on agenda. Her background was decidedly under-reported, for a few justifications, including preventing a preferred audience from sympathizing with the victim.
Not sure what your point is other than volume of information available increases over time.
You do have a point. My point is that we are constantly a part of informational warfare and it is getting old. I would love nothing more than people to look at it all with a cold eye and say something akin to: oh, I recognize this pattern. Instead, I attempts of various power centers to frame it in a way beneficial to them. Some of us are rather tired of this.
But why is your own framing exempt from the analysis? The idea that you should see a murder and "look at it all with a cold eye", to try and dispassionately understand whether it might have been justified, is a non-obvious idea that's quite advantageous to power centers that expect to be shooting people frequently.
Again, this concept of "newly assigned martyr" you have is not something that fell from heaven fully formed. It was shaped and given to you by what you call "power centers" - ones which are currently running the United States government! - because they think this framing is beneficial to them. I'm going to stop the conversation here before I start coming up with unwise insults, because it's just infuriating that you can't turn this critical eye on yourself and the informational warfare you're subject to.
What's infuriating is that you are acting as an agent of the government, defending their murder of a random citizen, but perceive yourself and frame yourself as a dispassionate observer who's interested in the media dynamics of how different descriptors get attached to people. I don't know if you started off like this, or if you're so deep in DHS propaganda that you can't find your way out, and right now I don't care to find out.
The difference between us that I know exactly what ( and even why ) I advocate for: keeping the system stable.
<< random citizen
She was a not some random citizen; I would have been addressing it differently if that was the case. Now, if you have a stomach for it, we can go over what kind of citizen she was.
I fundamentally disagree that ICE deserves that presumption. They have repeatedly demonstrated themselves to be unreasonable people who want to hurt others. I'm sure there's a story they'll tell about why it was totally legal to shoot her, but they're murderers and you're supporting murderers until they prove that there was she was doing something so terrible they had no choice.
Hm, as with taxes, do we get to choose which federal enforcement agency we are willing to submit to? Not going to lie man, it is a fascinating frame of mind to me and I am absolutely willing to talk to you about it if you wanna go that route.
<< but they're murderers and you're supporting murderers until they prove
This is not exactly how any of it works, at all. I am not being difficult man, but I don't get to, say, block FBI caravan, because I don't think they deserve 'that' presumption ( quotation, because I am not certain what it refers to ).
I similarly don't get to tell DEA, ATF, and multiple other agencies to just fuck off, especially if I encounter them in the wild.. doubly so, if I was attempting to track them that day..
The real question then becomes:
Why do you think you get to pick and choose, who can enforce the laws of the land upon you?
More importantly, whose authority would you accept?
They just shot another couple in Portland. I get to tell them, and you, to fuck off as much as I'd like. I encourage you to get on board with the right side of this issue while you have the chance.
Good luck out there friend. I am not sure what you meant to say, but it may be a good idea to stop here for both of us. I see no reason to continue this further.
I think you know precisely what I meant to say. There will come a time when the stain of having supported these murderers will be inescapable. At best you'll live in fear that your life will be ruined forever if anyone ever makes a viral post with strategic quotes from your 2026 commentary. You still have a chance to escape that fate if you want to.
Best of luck in your endeavors. As noted above, it would be wise for you to stop now before you say something very, very unnecessary. I urge you to reconsider this path.
If you are actually issuing a threat and feel confident nonetheless, feel free to post it in plain English for everyone to see.
That said, in spirit of kumbaya hand holding, I would like to offer you a chance to look at the reality around you.
If you look at the released cam video, the only thing that is clear that Renee was not an innocent bystander.
I urge you to pull yourself out of the radicalization spiral you're in. This video shows an innocent victim whose murderer will be prosecuted and convicted. He calls the victim a "fucking bitch" at the end, I'm genuinely baffled what twists of logic you're using to not see this.
I would emphasize since you mentioned it that I don’t intend any sort of threat. Despite the murderers’ best efforts, we do still live in a free country with free speech. Supporting murder is a terrible thing to do, and I will never in this lifetime hold the hand of someone who does, but it isn’t a crime and doesn’t deserve anything other than deep and enduring shame.
its not some pattern of abuse by shady actors manipulating opinions youre noticing, its voting algorithm and attention economy itself.
new ideas are constantly being published, and popular ones gain momentum by being shown to more people. as the idea gets saturated, the popularity gets overshadowed by the time based downranking.
if the idea is still popular though, in this case that ice murdered some woman as part of their shock and awe campaign, variations are going to show up such as "legal observer" and "mother of a three year old"
The author is right that AI video is being used to propagandize and rot minds at scale in a way sort of unthinkable a couple years ago. Short-form video content wasn't good for us beforehand, but any balance has been fully upturned.
(I think that's all intrinsic to genAI in a way the author doesn't want to confront, but there is a crisis)
It's hard to pick just one reason, but off the top of my head:
* Any failure tends to turn flying things into unguided missiles
* Noise is extremely hard to control -- I did an FAA helicopter discovery lesson, and oof
* Cities tend to have difficult to manage wind currents and hit-or-miss visibility. I was in a skyscraper across from one hit by a helicopter trying and failing to land in 2019 -- there's reasons for city no-fly zones
* Limited landing sites makes them highly situational in the first place, unless you want your streets to be helipads, which you don't
These are all fairly intrinsic and not mitigable. I can think of more issues more in the sticks, but you get the idea.
There are about 80,000 non-essential helicopter flights in Manhattan annually -[0]. That means a) there is a lot of demand, and b) it’s been pretty safe, with accidents being very rare.
Many people are against helicopters on the grounds of noise, safety and pollution. Electric taxis will be welcomed once they are certified and economical. They only need to do better than helicopters.
> Electric taxis will be welcomed once they are certified and economical.
Do you believe helicopters are noisy because they're not electric ? Your electric taxi will do the same thing: they need propellers. Propellers that can carry up to 1 ton are fucking loud.
Electric taxis will never be welcomed because they are a dumb idea.
The wind in NYC is no joke. In brooklyn yesterday there were gusts so strong that car alarms were going off. In some apartment buildings, the handicap-accessible automatic doors simply cannot open into the wind.
One more reason is that it cannot actually solve the traffic problem that it claims to solve. It might be able to solve it for rich people when they are the only ones that can afford to travel by air, but if the cost ever comes down low enough for the masses to afford it, I don’t see any reason that congestion wouldn’t be as bad or worse than it is now. And to me it’s not a good investment to improve things just for rich people.
There’s just a lot more space when you can move in three dimensions, so I don’t think the congestion limitations of non-flying cars are likely to be replicated. IIUC (I’m no expert) that’s one of the most attractive features of flying VTOL vehicles.
You're bandwidth-limited on a sparse serialized landing site map no matter what, and you need far higher distance margins that will eat up basically all of the dimensional advantages.
If ground vehicles side-swipe, it's just an insurance claim. If flying vehicles sideswipe, it's a Problem(tm).
I honestly think the most attractive features of VTOL vehicles are that they are from sci fi, and you can look up and see a bunch of empty space and wish you were there while sitting in traffic.
I am (usually) not willing to assume that the founders of highly technical startups would not consider something that I as an outsider would in the first 5 minutes of engaging with the topic.
That makes me skeptical of all of these (minus the wind currents in cities, that might have taken a little longer).
Founders can be chasing a dream and in doing so mesmerize investors. Or they capitalize on that same dream being the investor's. Even if it's not viable, it can still be really fun company to work for and/or earn money at. Even if there is a small lane for that sort of flying machine, the sheer number of companies purportedly working on something like that is suspect. Given the huge costs for development and certification, and the small number of vehicles that will really get deployed (certainly for the first so many years), there must be many that are never going to make their money back. I worked for a drone-adjacent company and now my LinkedIn is swamped with these startups.
Here's my sanity check when reading something like this on hn: What do you have me believe about the founder/investors? I understand that it's fun and common around here to be arrogant enough to presume that other people are absolute idiots, who are incredibly bad at their jobs, but I am not interested. If all you can bring are "duh" ideas, then that's a red flag.
Unless you can bring really insightful ideas, I am going to err on the side of the people who put years of their time into it and the people who put millions of dollars into it
Are they still going to be wrong? Of course. Am I likely to think the sidechair hn commentator is simply missing something in the bigger picture? Yes (and I can think of multiple concrete things in this case)
If a startup were able to truly solve the first two issues alone, they would not be burning those world-changing engineering solutions on flying taxis.
I don't know if a silent, fail-safe, and efficient method of flight is physically impossible or not, but I do know this is low on the list of applications it would be first seen in.
EDIT: I'm looking at the air taxi companies this thread started with, and no, they have not solved any of the relevant problems.
Theranos was famously founded on pitches about blood testing from finger pricks that literally any phlebotomist and many people with a modest life science background could've told you were physically and statistically impossible on their face. You should be considerably less credulous toward startup grifters.
The reason why you (and everyone else) knows about Theranos is that it was unique, which serves as a bad signifier if you want to judge what is likely to happen with the next startup. Being in prison and losing billions of dollars is just not something most people get excited about.
The reason we know about Theranos is because they took the grift up to a huge level and went from grift to outright fraud once they had to show actual results.
It is not only not unique, but in fact extremely common for startups to be grifts around impossible technical promises, live a few years off gullible investors who have way more money than sens and/or for whom losing a few million dollars on a long shot is just as bad as me wasting a few dollars on a gizmo off Temu I know probably won't work, and which then die out because their ideas obviously couldn't work.
They even sometimes find a niche by pivoting to some vaguely related tech. Say, while flying taxis obviously won't work, a startup trying to build them might find itself developing into a small company building helicopter propeller blades for some specific niche.
This sort of thing has been a devolving disaster since the Settings App was included in Windows 8 as a partial replacement for the Control Panel. I'm not sure the current state of things, but as of the last time I used Windows, the sets of functionality remained only partially overlapping between the two different tools.
The partial overlap has been in this state now for years and years. I still have to access the control panel for network device control, sound control, and some of the advanced sharing settings. I thought it would be a short transition but now we just have crappy partial duplicates of settings and ui styles scattered around this half baked migration. When I open the disk volume management it's like I'm back on Windows 2000 for some reason.
Regular volume management can be done entirely within the Settings app. So can sound settings. There's probably an outlier that diskmgmt does better, I'm sure. But diskpart still exists, too. It could be that MSFT targets only the common scenarios and the fallback ends up being old utils/PowerShell at some point.
As far as I know, to modify the audio Exclusive Mode settings and view jack information, you still need to use mmsys.cpl from the Control Panel. And I think many operations like converting MBR to GPT still require the Disk Management control panel.
Waving it away as little-used features is not an excuse, it's the entire reason things got this way. That's why we have layers upon layers of half baked UI with "only" the controls that "everyone" needs. Because those rationalizations are wrong and this is the result.
And seeing as Windows is now a nightmare, and I am a technical person, I’ve moved everything to Linux.
Everything is still harder to get set up right on Linux, but it stays right. I’ve also found the LLM’s dramatically shorten the time required to configure things I don’t have experience with.
MS have abandoned their power users, and the power users (some of them at least), are abandoning MS. I keep Windows around in a VM for work purposes; never had a better setup! I’m in complete control of my PC again.
Somehow macOS only has one System Settings app. (They did admittedly make a mess of it lately, but in an entirely different way than Windows.) And yes, they relegate a lot of advanced stuff to the Terminal.
Honestly I always hope that what I try to do, is still possible with the old Control Panel, since there I at least get understandable descriptions and can actually change things instead of the marketing speech and locked down settings in that abomination called "Settings app".
Oh but nowadays you have to access the old Control Panel only to access advanced options, like... setting the actions for lid close and power button, apparently.
But Microsoft is a small business which just cannot afford to have two versions of interfaces for clearly distinct modes of interaction: touch and mouse-based. They had no other choice except trying to merge things together.
Russia and China are just made-up excuses for Trump to do what he wants to do: steal territory, at gunpoint if needed.
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