Given the opportunity, at the time, I would have happily taken steps to prove my presence would be of benefit. Instead, I had to spend my time asking family to give me their pension statements.
Later, I was recognized for that potential benefit. Last December, I became a citizen.
1. Citizens have a right to enter at ports of entry, can refuse to hand over social media accounts, etc. Greencard holders are still at the discretion of border officials.
2. Citizens can wander the world and live abroad for however long they fancy and always be allowed to return to their country of citizenship when things go awry. Greencard holders can't do that.
3. Citizens get consular protection, greencard holders don't.
I lived in central Europe for two years. Had to wait in line for 20 hours halfway through my time there to renew my visa, otherwise it wasn't much of an issue.
Actually, if you do something bad enough, your citizenship can be removed. This is true in the US, UK, India, and maybe others. The exact procedures and criteria vary.
If you leave the country for more than 6 months, you need to seek prior approval, and you definitely can lose it. I was on Green Card and when I crossed the border, I was questioned by the customs officer as to why I didn't get my citizenship yet because it was 15 years I was on GC and the point of the GC wasn't to be literally permanent. I quickly got my citizenship after that just in case the same thing happened again.
If you get arrested for a major crime, you can lose your GC but you can only lose your citizenship if you lied or committed fraud at the time of your application, or if you committed treason against the government.
>If you leave the country for more than 6 months, you need to seek prior approval, and you definitely can lose it.
Doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
>If you get arrested for a major crime, you can lose your GC but you can only lose your citizenship if you lied or committed fraud at the time of your application, or if you committed treason against the government.
California and New York are the most famous examples but asking perplexity I got:
As of the current 2026 rules, the states that do not require ID at the polls are: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Washington, and Wisconsin, plus Delaware has a special affidavit process if you do not have ID
In some of those locations non-citizens can vote in local elections, like Maryland and San Francisco. Also in some of those locations you get registered by the DMV, like California, and non citizens mistakenly have voted in Federal elections (which is a crime).
Note I am not endorsing the latter as it can come up in future citizenship applications.
There’s the answer I was actually expecting. Yes, in some LOCALITIES, (which “Maryland” is not) non-citizens can vote in things such as school board elections. Voting in any statewide or federal election as a non citizen in any state is still a crime.
Wish granted: You are no longer a citizen because you never "proved you were beneficial". Please remit $100,000 to the Citizenship Payment Service immediately to avoid being downgraded to serfdom. /s
Framing it that way is backwards and anti-democratic. Democratic citizenship is something the government "owes" you because it is imposing control on your life. It is not some kind of magnanimous gift of club membership, you already deserved to have a say in what's being done to you.
That's why most Americans (and their children) have never once been required to "prove" that they are "beneficial", and it's why people the government is controlling in jails are still citizens rather than objects.
Speak for yourself. I do write essays in Slack. Just because you, the author, are too dumb or too lazy to put some effort into written communication, doesn't mean that we can't do it either.
A while ago I worked with a guy that did not put effort into written communication and he was doing the marketing for the company. I would have words with the boss about this and, initially, I struggled to explain why spelling, grammar, punctuation and use of paragraphs was important.
After some thought I was better able to explain the not-so-obvious. It is all about respecting the time of the reader.
Some people don't respect the reader since they think they are important. Notably with the Ep*tein files, we have this clique of wealthy people, with few of them able to string two sentences together. Writing standards were those of an eight year old at best.
Personally I write fairly long form because I don't have ideas that I can express in glorified grunts. However, this LLM stuff is encroaching on my turf, since the likes of the guy I used to struggle with can now churn out better English than I can. That is the problem for those of us from the pre-internet, pre-grammar-checking age when written communication mattered.
Yes. Here in Hamburg you have to pay some useless consultant to come to your house and check that there's no other way to decrease the temperature before you are allowed to install one.
You are also not allowed to but your bicycle in the garage.
Accelerationists are people who want to embrace the ultra-capitalist surveillance state to force a societal collapse in order to eventually built a better society on its ruins. We are very far from that goal, so I don't see how they have been proven right about anything.
The police will try to discourage from reporting that at all, and if you insist you'll get the crime number and promise that nothing will ever be done.
They even refuse to send the patrol that could recover a stolen car despite the owner pinpointing it to the very specific garage based on the GPS tracking.
The police will, however, beat you and arrest if you dare ro protest against killing kids with bombs.
Send me a shipping label. (I'm only half-joking. I told the original seller I'd send it back to them, so I feel like I ought to give them at least a week or two to get me the label they said they'd send. But, seriously, email me in a month, and if I still haven't heard back from the seller, I'll send it to you.)
Out of curiosity, based on a comment I read on HN the other day, I fed your profile notes into Claude and asked it to tell me your email address. It had no problem. I guess the days of obfuscating email addresses that way to foil scrapers is behind us.
That is a fair observation, especially since my default Claude model is Opus 4.6, which is about as far away from efficient as you can get. I don't have any recent models downloaded on my MBP, but maybe this evening I'll try it again and see how that goes -- especially the smaller lightweight models.
I'm a native English speaker who's very exposed to French, but doesn't speak it, I find the use of accents in French very welcome to getting the pronunciation right when exposed to a new word. English is just a mess in comparison and I wish it had made use of accents as well to avoid a lot of the ambiguities in pronunciation. Perhaps some of the old English letters that are no longer in use helped a bit, but I'm not familiar enough with those to know if it used to be better.
You mean kinda like how (as I recently was informed) "ye olde" is actually pronounced "the old" but written "ye" because of printing issues, and consequently mispronounced by almost everyone?
Them be fighting words!
But as a native French speaker, I wholeheartedly agree that it is a tricky language. But there is so much pleasure in speaking it that I miss in English sometimes.
Fabrice Lucchini (an actor) is speaking about the language of Louis-Ferdinand Céline (an author from last century): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHrkC3vaqB8
Even if you do not speak French, I hope the passion comes through.
This is about markets. It has nothing to do with capitalism. And in fact, it is usually _because_ of healthy competition that this type of enshittification happens everywhere because quality is hard to compare for the buyers and so the sellers are forced to compete on cost.
How the hell can healthy competition breed enshittification? That makes absolutely no sense to me.
Take an industry with healthy competition like restaurants. You can compete in price, quality, format, service and probably a lot more.
Now tell me how that competition enshittified eating at restaurants?
For me, nothing stands out. If a restaurant charges nonsense fees, under-staffs to increase profits, reduce portions with the same value, etc. I can simply go to another one. Restaurants that enshittify will almost inevitably close.
But if we look at a closely related industry like the food delivery apps, we see the same exact signs of enshittification we see on the tech world due to monopolies (or oligopolies to be more exact) like:
- Increased/hidden fees
- Increased delivery times
- Crappy apps with ads everywhere
- Ineffective review systems
- Pay-to-win search
- Dynamic pricing
They can get away with it because realistically, you don't have any other options. The cost to entry might not be that high but the network effect all but prohibits competition.
> Take an industry with healthy competition like restaurants. You can compete in price, quality, format, service and probably a lot more.
Yes, and you correctly point out: On the average restaurant visit, nothing stands out. A good restaurant only needs to provide not-terrible food and not-terrible service to be almost indistinguishable from all others. Quality of a restaurant visit is hard to measure and compare. Price is easy to measure. Thus, the rational consumer will prefer the cheaper option (and even at the same price, a restaurant with lower costs will be more profitable, thus expand more easily).
The same thing happens on Amazon and other market places: When it is difficult to compare quality, price always wins out. Some products are interchangeable with well defined specs, like a 16GB RAM stick is obviously twice as good as 8GB RAM and so it can be twice as expensive and still sell. But when I'm looking for a new light for my bicycle there are no standardized specs to compare. All the product descriptions and pictures are exaggerated. I have no reliable information to tell if the lamp that is twice as expensive is really twice as good (and from personal experience: they never are), so I'm buying the cheapest one cause I expect all of the products to be equally crappy no matter the price.
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