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Cake day: December 5th, 2023

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  • The article is not clear about what specific visas are affected, so I’m not sure what’s changing.

    To give two examples, my sister and I are both Canadians living in the US.

    My sister met a guy online twenty years ago, did some cross-border trips to visit each other for a year, then he proposed while she was visiting him one time. Since she was now planning to move to the US, she could not move towards getting a green card from a tourist visa. So, she and her new husband traveled to Canada and reentered the US, declaring her intent to become a permanent resident (and probably had a bunch of paperwork, including their marriage certificate). I believe she was allowed to stay in the US while the green card process played out. Maybe this is the part that’s changing?

    In my case, I was working for a US company abroad, and transferred to headquarters on an L1 visa (highly skilled internal worker). About six months after moving, the company’s immigration lawyers kicked off the process to get me a green card and I received it a little shy of two years after moving. Changing this process would mess things up, since (by definition) I was in the US for my job and would have had a hard time leaving the country for over a year while the green card process played out.

    The distinction is the “intent” of a given type of visa. The tourist visa specifically implies “I’m here to visit, then get the hell out”. The L1 visa (as well as the TN, the H1-B, and a few others) is specifically designated as a “dual intent” visa, meaning “I might plan to stay permanently”. If they’re changing the rules for dual intent visas, that’s messed up. If they’re not, I’m not sure what exactly is changing.







  • Yeah… I received the email teasing their upcoming announcement.

    Here is the text in full for the context:

    We’ve spent the last six years in Framework proving that it’s possible to build high-performance, thin, light computers that last longer and respect your rights through repairability, upgradeability, and customization. We’re happy to see repair rapidly becoming the norm rather than the exception, with even Apple of all companies embracing it on their latest notebook. I built this company specifically to reset and fix a broken industry. So, mission accomplished? Not quite. There is a very real scenario in which personal computing as we know it is dead.

    Memory, storage, silicon, and everything related to it is being consumed at unprecedented levels in a “winner takes all” race to an AI-first world in which access to compute is metered by the token. It’s clear that the fundamentals of computing and electronics have changed. The computer in the cloud has increasingly greater economic output than the computer in the hand. This means that to the extent that there are constraints on the supply that feeds both, the cloud will win every time. We see this in the rapidly rising costs of silicon and all of the devices that depend on it, the shift from ownership to subscription, and the rise of closed black boxes over an open ecosystem. What does this all mean? The industry is asking you to own nothing and be happy. Computers are no longer a bicycle for the mind. They are becoming the self-driving car that takes you directly to the destination.

    You might be reading all of this and thinking, is this a farewell letter to personal computing? Is this the end of Framework? No, this is a manifesto. No matter how inevitable the AI-takes-all scenario may sound, as long as there is a person in the world who still wants to own their means of computation, we will be here to build the hardware that enables it. That means computers that you can own at the deepest level and do what you want with, whether that is choosing your OS, modifying your hardware, or even just keeping your data and computation local rather than leased from the cloud. We won’t get there all at once, but we will always be fighting for a future where you can own everything and be free.

    Every step we take and every product we ship serves that goal. With that, we’re happy to announce that we have our next live launch event coming on April 21st at 10:30am Pacific time in San Francisco. During the event, we’ll be streaming our announcements live to the Framework YouTube channel. You can subscribe and get notified when the stream goes live. We can’t wait for you to see what we’ve been working on.

    These products are for you, so we’re opening a batch of invitations to the Framework Community so you can meet the team and get hands on with our newest products. Having community members at our event last year was a lot of fun, and we can’t wait for you to join us alongside press and partners. If you’re a Framework fan and are in the San Francisco area (or are able to handle your own travel to us), you can apply to attend in this sign-up form. We expect we’ll see a lot more interest than we have available seats in our venue, so don’t wait to get your application in.

    We have one other update for you ahead of our launch event, which is that our products are now available to ship to four additional countries: New Zealand, Norway, Switzerland, and Singapore. You can start ordering everything we have in-stock now, though you may want to wait until the 21st to see what we’re announcing!

    For a hint at what we’ll be announcing, head to the event page.




  • In Canada, polling stations are also run by members of the public. I think they get paid, but it’s a small enough amount that most people think of it as volunteering. In my experience, it’s usually retired people. They also sit there for the day. On election day itself, they’re also responsible for counting the ballots and making sure that the ballots are preserved. (I was once a volunteer scrutineer for one of the political parties, so I got to be there to watch the ballot-counting process.)

    Regarding early voting, my recollection is that a subset of polling places were open on two or three specific days in the weeks leading up to the election. Like, if my riding had 25 polling sites, only maybe 4 (one in each “quadrant”) were open for early voting. On the plus side, I think the early voting days were usually on weekends.

    On the topic of “remote voting”, my wife is Romanian and used to vote at the train station in Iași, since her official residence was still her home town. I always thought that was an interesting solution to the “voting outside your home district” problem, since it kind of implies that you’re away from home because you’ve been riding a train. That said, since Iași is a university town and most people never seem to update their official residence (like, most of my tech worker friends officially “lived” in their hometown, even if they’d been in Iași for 10 years), the lineup to vote at the train station during a presidential runoff could be hours long. Of course, nobody needs to “register” to vote at the train station, since they just show their national ID card to prove they’re eligible to vote.


  • Not saying that he won’t try, but the president has no (constitutional) say in the sitting of congress.

    I looked it up and in Powell vs McCormack (1969), the Supreme Court ruled that the speaker of the house has no authority to deny a representative sent by their respective state. So, unless the current Supreme Court decides to overturn that precedent, it would require a 2/3 majority vote of the newly-seated house to expel someone, assuming I’ve understood correctly (which is questionable).

    Tl;dr: I think even this couldn’t necessarily prevent folks who win in November from serving.





  • msfroh@lemmy.catomemes@lemmy.worldLmao
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    3 months ago

    I remember early in the run of BBT, when I had already decided the show was not for me (not helped by people comparing me to Sheldon – yay, neurodivergence), I saw Jim Parsons on the Craig Ferguson show. He picked up Craig’s TARDIS from his desk and giggled, saying “This is so cute! What is it?”

    I think Kaley Cuoco would have recognized the fucking TARDIS.


  • I read an article from a somewhat progressive source a few years ago advocating for this very change.

    The essential argument was that the “2 stairwells at opposite ends of the building” requirement was a product of an earlier era when building materials were more flammable, buildings didn’t have sprinkler systems, and some other code changes. The article said that it was much cheaper to build one stairwell in the middle of a building, adjacent to the elevator bank, and modern fire safety measures ensure that it’s still safe enough.

    I don’t have a strong opinion, personally, but the argument doesn’t seem completely dystopian.