The very concept they've been trying to sell is wrong headed.
Kids are trying to access XYZ which isn't safe (where XYZ may as well be "the internet") -> verify the ages of all adults, because we can't verify the age of a kid.
Meanwhile kids, like adults, can just find another route to access what they want. So some subset of adults hands over their identity information to an untrustworthy third party of dubious security.
I can't see how that does anything other than make the situation worse.
At the same age I was using the school's phone bill to phone beer companies and request they send me beer mats, so I could swap them with other kids in the playground. And they did, which seems a little off these days.
Reading this I wish I'd set my sights higher, figuratively and literally!
The reasoning for some of these questions is that if you are caught, it’s sometimes easier to charge you with fraud (lying on the form) than the actual thing (such as espionage).
Thats why I presume its asking about previous engagements, if they catch someone they suspect of espionage, dig into their background and find proof of previous activity they have a clear fraud charge without having to prove their suspicions about current activities.
There's often also some arbitrage on standard of proof or statutes of limitation or jurisdiction.
Maybe to deport you for espionage requires a jury trial, but to revoke status for misleading answers on an immigration form is administrative and so is deportation for lack of status.
I seem to recall some extraordinary cases where untruthful answers on immigration forms were used to justify denaturalization.
The fact you worked for an intelligence agency doesn’t mean you were an intelligence officer. You could’ve been a cleaner, or an executive assistant, or maybe you were working as a software developer on the payroll system.
Those forms also ask if you've ever been a member of a communist party, and basically everyone over 35 in all of Eastern Europe would have to check that one (they don't, if they want to enter the US)
People born in the 90s wouldn’t have a chance to be old enough to belong to any group other than a preschool before the collapse of the Soviet and Soviet aligned regimes.
For those who were adults before 1990, while they may have been party members for reasons unrelated to political ideology, it wasn’t as common: in the late 80s, only ~10% of adults in Warsaw pact countries were communist party members. Far from “everyone”.
And even if you check that in the DS-160 visa application form, you are allowed to add an explanation. Consular visa officers are very well familiar with the political situation at the countries they are stationed in, and can grant visa even if the box is checked.
Yes, my sense of the passage of time is a little off. I've met folks who were members of the FDJ in East Germany as young teens, but as you say, they are 50-ish now.
This kind of logic does more disservice than people realize. You can combat bigotry towards immigrants (issue #1), without covering up for criminal immigrants (issue #2) in fear of increase of issue #1 among the natives. It only brings up more resentment and bigotry.
You can also insinuate that decisions completely unrelated to immigrants (issue #3) are a coverup to "protect immigrants" in order to use the popularity of bigotry towards immigrants (issue #1) to make the issue salient to bigots that have literally no interest in the rights or wrongs of third party court databases, which anyone with the slightest level of political understanding can see is going on here.
Crimes are committed by individuals. "Immigrants" is a group.
Prosecution of sexual assault is often handled extremely badly. It needs to be done better, without fear or favor, including people who are friends with the police or in positions of power. As we're seeing the fallout of the Epstein files.
- Trying to claim things are just a series of isolated incidents with absolutely nothing in common
- Claiming there are wider problems (that should be addressed in a manner that would take years and isn't even defined well enough to claim measure as being "better")
> Crimes are committed by individuals. "Immigrants" is a group.
Great. How does it change the substance of my comment?
Perhaps, instead of arguing about whether “immigrants” is always a group as a collective, or a certain number of individuals acting together, you would focus on the high level implications of government’s action or inaction?
What do Epstein files have to do with anything right now? Stop shifting the goal posts.
Can you explain your reasoning? Horrible crimes committed by foreign men against native children were covered up for political reasons in the UK. This is common knowledge.
In the case of Rotherham, I believe that most of those committing the crimes were not foreign; most were British born British nationals. Ethnicity is not the same as immigration status.
The question is: Would the crimes have been covered up by authorities if the predators were ethnically English and the victims were children of foreigners?
Anyone who's actually paid any attention to the many documented failings of the child protection services in those cases knows the answer to that question is "yes".
The problem with that argument is that, IIRC, there is direct evidence that one reasons that the abuse was covered up was that authorities were afraid of being accused of racism and/or of stirring up ethnic tensions. I don't think that, to accept this, you need believe that CPS is always perfect when this issue is absent.
This is one of the factors that lead to crimes not being better investigated at the time, but then fear of tensions would cases where the alleged perpetrators were white and the victims/witnesses non-white as in the OP's question. (And more generally, teenage girls from working class backgrounds got far less sympathy and far more scepticism than they should have done from the police and CPS and even social workers when they talked about being sexually exploited regardless of race. Certainly no evidence was found they were much more keen to listen to non-white victims or prosecute white people...)
This database exposed half a million weekend cases which were heard with zero press notification. Many grooming gang trials were heard this way. The database is being deleted weeks before the national inquiry into the grooming gang cover up begins, and the official reason for deleting the data is nonsensical.
Actually that’s what data and the preponderance of victims allege: an intersection of immigration and policing which interlocked to systematically deprioritize the investigation into abuse of working-class white girls by an over represented ethnic group.
In the local data that the audit examined from three police forces, they identified clear evidence of “over-representation among suspects of Asian and Pakistani-heritage men”.
It’s unfortunate to watch people and entire countries twist themselves in logic pretzels to avoid ever suggesting that immigration has no ills, and we’re just being polite here about it.
It's all beginning to feel a bit like an arms race where you have to go at a breakneck pace or someone else is going to beat you, and winner takes all.
But what if AI turns out to be a commodity? We're already replacing ChatGPT by Claude or Gemini, whenever we feel like it. Nobody has a moat. It seems the real moat is with hardware companies, or silicon fabs even.
The arms race is just to keep the investors coming, because they still believe that there is a market to corner.
There is a very high barrier to entry (capital) and its only going to increase, so doubtful there will be any more player then the ones we have. Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI and Google seem like they will be the big four. Only reason a late comer like xAI can compete is Elon had the resources to build a massive data centre and hire talent. They will share the spoils between them, maybe one will drop the ball though
I think the winner will be who can keep operating at these losses without going bankrupt. Whoever can do that gets all the users, my bet is Google uses their capital to outlast OpenAI, Anthropic, and everyone else. Apple is just going to license the winner and since they're already making a deal with Google i guess they've made their bet.
If it’s a commodity then it’s even more competitive so the ability for companies to impose safety rules is even weaker.
Imagine if Ford had a monopoly on cars, they could unilaterally set an 85mph speed limit on all vehicles to improve safety. Or even a 56mph limit for environmental-ethical reasons.
Ford can’t do this in real life because customers would revolt at the company sacrificing their individual happiness for collective good.
Similarly GPT 3.5 could set whatever ethical rules it wanted because users didn’t have other options.
You mean the standard 180kph speed limiter (which is on all cars in Japan) is removed on the GT-R when it's on a track based on GPS. There's nothing stopping you from racing it up to 180kph on the street.
If you’re using the AI answers on the top of Google search results to judge Gemini, you’re as ignorant as the journalists and researchers using ChatGPT-3.5 to make sweeping statements about “LLMs can never [X]” when X is currently being done in production just fine. The search results page uses a tiny flash model (it has to, at the scale it’s being used at) and has nothing to do with the capabilities of Gemini 3 Pro.
I mean, the leaders of these companies and politicians have been framing it that way for a while, but if AGI isn't possible with LLMs (which I think is the case, and a lot of important scientists also think this), then it raises a question: arms race to WHAT exactly? Mass unemployment and wealth redistribution upwards? So AI can produce what humans previously did, but kinda worse, with a lot of supervision? I don't hate AI tech, I use it daily, but I'm seriously questioning where this is actually supposed to go on a societal level.
I think that’s why they are encouraging the mindset mentioned in your parent comment: it’s completely reversed the tech job market to have people thinking they have to accept whatever’s offered, allowing a reversal of the wages and benefits improvements which workers saw around the pandemic. It doesn’t even have to be truly caused by AI, just getting information workers to think they’re about to be replaced is worth billions to companies.
I'm 43. Took a year or so off from contracting after being flat out for years without taking any breaks, just poked around with some personal projects, did some stuff for my wife's company, petitioned the NHS to fix some stuff. Used Claude Code for much of it. Travelled a bit too.
I feel like I turned around and there seem to be no jobs now (500+ applications deep is a lot when you've always been given the first role you'd applied to) unless you have 2+ years commercial AI experience, which I don't, or perhaps want to sit in a SOC, which I don't. It's like a whole industry just disappeared while I had my back turned.
I looked at Java in Google Trends the other day, it doesn't feel like it was that long ago that people were bemoaning how abstracted that was, but it was everywhere. It doesn't seem to be anymore. I've tried telling myself that maybe it's because people are using LLMs to code, so it's not being searched for, but I think the game's probably up, we're in a different era now.
Not sure what I'm going to do for the next 20 years. I'm looking at getting a motorbike licence just to keep busy, but that won't pay the bills.
I’m 45 and contracted for over a decade before switching to product development. I used to still get inquiries from former customers, mainly for Java and Android work. But since about two years, it’s completely dried up. Anecdotally I’ve been hearing from friends who are still in the contracting/freelancing business that things are very tough right now. It makes sense to me, contractors are usually the first thing businesses cut when they’re either lowering their spending or becoming more efficient themselves.
Kids are trying to access XYZ which isn't safe (where XYZ may as well be "the internet") -> verify the ages of all adults, because we can't verify the age of a kid.
Meanwhile kids, like adults, can just find another route to access what they want. So some subset of adults hands over their identity information to an untrustworthy third party of dubious security.
I can't see how that does anything other than make the situation worse.
reply