At my company we make a niche software used by companies globally. Our plan was to arrange a conference in the US for our clients in North/Cental America. Considering the state of the US, we will probably cancel it, as we don't expect our Mexican and Canadian clients to feel comfortable at all. Neither do we at the head office in Europe.
We will instead host it in Europe most likely.
sterlind · 40d ago
I remember when the ACM ICPC had to be moved from Egypt to the US during the Arab Spring. It's got to be a logistics nightmare to move a conference, but it's best to bite the bullet at the first sign of trouble.
rhaps0dy · 40d ago
You could host it in Mexico or Canada, they're pretty nice!
vanviegen · 40d ago
For many travellers it would be hard to find a flight plan without a stop in the US though.
billfruit · 40d ago
And since many US airports do not have facilities for 'sterile transfers', people will require a US C1 Transit Visa to travel connecting through US.
gruturo · 40d ago
This is deliberate. To my knowledge, absolutely no US airports allow you to transit without going through immigration, and stopovers in the US are very hard to avoid because the FAA imposes a hefty fee to flights over the country unless they stop at a US airport.
So it's very expensive to overfly the US without landing, and once you land you can't avoid immigration even if you are just transiting on your way to another country.
winter_blue · 39d ago
> the FAA imposes a hefty fee to flights over the country
The overland fee is $61.75 per 100 nautical miles (and it's a lower $26.51 per 100 nautical miles)[1]. Is this really that high? Let's say a flight from Canada to Mexico has to cross 1600 nautical miles overland the US. That would cost 16 x 61.75 = $988. Isn't that pretty low? On a flight with 200 passengers, that's an extra $5 per passenger.
This has got me wondering how many flights currently fly over Greenland…
jnsaff2 · 40d ago
There are no airports in the US where you can transfer between two international flights without entering the US.
josephg · 40d ago
Are they hard to get? I’d expect transferring through the US to be significantly easier than travelling into the US for a conference.
klausa · 40d ago
They require issuance of paper visas and an in-person interview. It's _easier_ than B1/B2 visas; but in the overall scheme of things not _that_ much easier.
mikepurvis · 39d ago
For a person deliberately avoiding the US (whether out of principle or otherwise), I can't imagine a trip through customs for a transfer would be acceptable either.
4ndrewl · 40d ago
idk this. Thank you.
andsoitis · 40d ago
From which countries do you need to transit through the US to get either to Canada or Mexico?
vanviegen · 39d ago
'Need', probably none. But the workaround may involve a very long and expensive detour.
actionfromafar · 40d ago
Never thought of it, but I guess that will eventually change.
Teever · 40d ago
That's a great idea. I can't speak about Mexican alternatives but there are many great locations in Canada for a conference.
If the conference was originally going to be held on the west coast of the US then Vancouver would be an excellent alternative and if it was going to be held on the east coast then Montreal is another excellent alternative.
Can anyone suggest some viable alternatives in Mexico?
kamma4434 · 40d ago
Depends on when the conference is scheduled, but Mexico has some world renewed venues at the seaside - say Cancun- that nobody minds visiting when it’s winter at home. :-)
bigfatkitten · 40d ago
I work for a US company that almost exclusively hosts internal get-togethers in Cancun.
It's much better value for money than anywhere in the US.
semi-extrinsic · 40d ago
I was in a conference in a resort in Riviera Maya some years back. 10/10 would recommend. I was amazed to see you could even drink the tap water.
readthenotes1 · 40d ago
I noted that a bunch of physicists met in Cancun on December 10th to discuss the new Galaxy survey that led to questioning the stability of the strength of deep energy.
Those guys were pretty smart
japanuspus · 40d ago
Traveling to awesome places is a perk of (physics) academia that is not widely appreciated. A large fraction of physicist seems to do rock-climbing or other hobbies that align well with exploring the outdoors when traveling.
I got my first taste of this with this was a summer school at Les Houches in the French Alps [0], and after graduating I did postdoc positions on three different continents -- all the time appreciating that unlike corporate expats, I got to choose the exact place to go next. Would highly recommend this way of traveling over backpacking.
Aren't there still violent conflicts with drug gangs where citizens are killed still going on in Mexico?
blackeyeblitzar · 39d ago
Yes absolutely. It’s odd to see people here suggesting Mexico as an alternative based on safety of travelers. It’s a giveaway that they’re simply being opportunistic in attacking America due to their opposition to the administration, rather than anything actually safety related.
As an example, this article from 2025 about a family of foreigners being shot dead also lists numerous other recent examples of tourists being killed, and links to those stories:
Those aren’t even the only ones, and physical harm isn’t the only type of crime foreigners can experience in Mexico either. Moving a conference there for safety makes no sense whatsoever.
tga_d · 39d ago
There are certainly plenty of areas in Mexico that are dangerous (typically along the US border and drug routes), but it's not as though everywhere in the country is more dangerous than everywhere in the US. E.g., I've been to academic conferences in plenty of US cities that rank among the most dangerous in the world (Baltimore, Oakland, Philly, etc.), [0] as well as Mexico City, which decidedly does not rank among the most dangerous -- let alone the resort destinations. The reality is, "family on vacation murdered in cartel territory" is going to draw a lot more media attention than "family on vacation robbed in New Orleans" or "overwhelming majority of families have perfectly safe vacations". You can't judge by sensationalist articles how safe a place actually is, let alone an entire nation the size of Mexico.
I have been going to IETFs on and off for 20 years. As if the past few months were not nauseating enough in the US, I never thought I would see my own country on a page like this, and described in this way, and I feel even more deeply saddened, ashamed and horrified.
No comments yet
oldgradstudent · 40d ago
Is this a parody?
> Beyond problems at the border, the current Secretary for Health and Human Services - Robert F. Kennedy Jr. - has said that he will send those with ADHD to camps. Source: Futurism.
What he actually said:
> "I’m going to dedicate that revenue to creating wellness farms — drug rehabilitation farms, in rural areas all over this country," he said during the podcast. "I’m going to make it so people can go, if you’re convicted of a drug offense, or if you have a drug problem, you can go to one of these places for free."
That what happens when you rely on Futurism as a source.
graeme · 40d ago
The full quote extends that to adderal. To be clear he said the wellness farms would be for those who want to go, and he's describing a massive undertaking that you'd see coming before it was implemented.
But he was definitely talking about ADHD. This tweet has the short video of him actually including adderal.
Keep in mind he's also a guy who, contradicting all the available evidence, is saying incorrect things about the nature of adhd and dips heavily into moral issues when discussing medical problems. So any facilities related to his ideas are unlikely to provide actually care.
michaelsshaw · 40d ago
Obviously I'm super into giving the trump admin the benefit of the doubt. It's like, the number one thing that I like doing.
gherkinnn · 40d ago
The full quote, as per Futurism: (emphasis mine)
> I’m going to create these wellness farms where they can go to get off of illegal drugs, off of opiates, but also illegal drugs, other psychiatric drugs, if they want to, to get off of SSRIs, to get off of benzos, to get off of Adderall, and to spend time as much time as they need — three or four years if they need it — to learn to get reparented, to reconnect with communities,
I am not going to skim through 1.5h of deranged ramblings in a raspy voice to find him saying this though.
fastball · 40d ago
So he said nothing about ADHD.
philjohn · 40d ago
"to get off Adderall"
Are you trying to claim that because he didn't specifically mention ADHD, despite mentioning the drug used to treat ADHD, that he's not talking about ADHD despite him holding views about neurodiversity that are at odds with the published literature on their treatment?
fastball · 40d ago
Yes, that is exactly what I am saying. Are you trying to claim that all users of Adderall have ADHD? Because that is the only way you can say "well he is effectively talking about ADHD if he is talking about adderall", but that conflation is objectively untrue. Countless people without ADHD abuse adderall / ritalin / etc.
In fact, people without ADHD are much more in need of an intervention if they are abusing adderall than someone who has ADHD, wouldn't you say? So the much more reasonable interpretation is that he is talking about those people, not people with ADHD.
eqvinox · 39d ago
> Because that is the only way you can say "well he is effectively talking about ADHD if he is talking about adderall",
No it's not the only way, because he's also talking about SSRIs, which have only medical uses (no abuse potential really). Therefore it is reasonable to argue he is also talking about Adderall's intended medical use against ADHD rather than its abuse.
fastball · 39d ago
No, you can't put words in his mouth. He said Adderall, not ADHD.
Yes he said SSRIs, but SSRIs are not for ADHD, so that has no bearing on whether or not he said "people with ADHD should be sent to camps", which he just... did not say.
This shouldn't need to be stated, but I personally think RFK Jr. is a nutter. That doesn't mean you can stick words in his mouth or imply things he didn't actually say.
Be better than the other side.
eqvinox · 39d ago
That's all nice and well, but he also did say "psychiatric drugs", as if those were somehow generally bad and appropriate to reference in the same breath as illegal drugs.
Maybe, had he not said that bit as well, I'd agree with you. He could be talking about Adderall purely in a sense of misuse.
But he included psychiatric drugs, and that (and the SSRIs) makes his statement ambiguous enough that I'm comfortable interpreting it as including ADHD patients.
(And, just purely for vilifying psychiatric drugs, the threshold for intolerance [which must not be tolerated in order to achieve a tolerant society] is crossed. Lots of people have mental health issues and need treatment, including with drugs.)
fastball · 39d ago
It doesn't matter what he even believes. You can't stick words in his mouth. He has not "said that he will send those with ADHD to camps".
ifyoubuildit · 39d ago
I think you and plenty of other people on this thread are missing the point. As I understand it, it's not "round up people with certain conditions and stick them in camps" (is this not obvious?)
It's to provide people a path for getting off of all manner of drugs that are difficult to get off of. That could be heroin, or it could be Ritalin or some SSRI. It's basically socialized rehab based on some model that RFK seems to favor.
From what I've read (and seen in friends and family), the system is really good at getting people on pharmaceuticals. It doesn't seem to give much of a shit about helping them get off when they choose to do so.
I'm not sure why, but there seems to be a focus on misuse or abuse. Someone could have used the drugs exactly as directed and now doesn't want to use them anymore, and is running into an inability to do so on their own.
Jolter · 40d ago
You could make the exact same argument about his mention of SSRIs. "Oh, he just means all the people without depression, who are abusing SSRIs."
No, you're being intentionally disingenuous here. Obviously, he dislikes the fact that these drugs are being prescribed to patients, and he would prefer it if they were not. I'm sure he imagines that these "farms" would be a better treatment for depression than SSRIs are, and likewise for the other drugs and conditions.
ifyoubuildit · 39d ago
Presumably it doesn't matter whether the person has depression or not. All that matters is whether they want to get off a drug and want help doing so.
ifyoubuildit · 39d ago
The idea is a place for anyone to get off any kind of drug they want to get off of. Note the "they want" part. Who are you to fault someone for deciding they no longer want to take a substance but need help doing so? Or someone trying to help that person?
ayewo · 40d ago
Adderall is a drug commonly abused by people without an ADHD diagnosis.
In a historical context “wellness farms” is understood as a euphemism for concentration camp. It’s free but you can’t leave.
silisili · 40d ago
If you talk to a parent of a child who OD'd, most commonly of fent these days, they all have this thought.
What if I took them somewhere remote where there are no drugs and didn't let them leave?
My heart hurts for them, but I have no idea if it's a good idea or not.
Regardless, I think his heart is in the right place. Time will tell whether or not it's actually useful.
rswail · 40d ago
If the parents went with the child, and stayed with them, then maybe.
But they don't, they outsource the job to a group of (mostly) sadistic, uneducated-in-rehab, "boot camps" that somehow think that violently invading an individual's rights and actions is how to "cure" drug addiction, without attempting to treat the underlying causes of addictive behavior.
croes · 40d ago
They had camps to cure gayness.
The problem isn’t the camps but the people who have the authority in them and how the treat people especially if the cure isn’t working.
Not everything can be cured by organic food, fresh air and labor.
BTW is the food the grow for the farms only or is selling it part of the plan?
If the latter then it’s about cheap labor
silisili · 40d ago
Yes and we used to kill witches for being... different.
That is to say, to any sane modern human, curing gayness is nothing like curing drug addiction.
We have to do something. Because whatever we've been doing for the past two decades has amounted to nothing.
And maybe that ends up being the answer, that there is nothing you can do. But I'll never insult someone for trying, no matter the method.
croes · 40d ago
People are still killed for being different, they just aren’t called witches.
>But I'll never insult someone for trying, no matter the method.
No matter the method is a bad take, that’s how we got gruesome people doing gruesome experiments on people who need treatment.
And the camp thing is pretty old and they always end the same: abuse of power.
silisili · 40d ago
> No matter the method is a bad take
Perhaps, but I have family going through this and it just makes you so mad. I'd pay to send him to a camp where he's beat with a bullwhip every day if I knew it could cure him.
Perhaps it clouds my judgment a bit, but the alternative is just watching him die, which I'm not stoked about.
croes · 40d ago
> if I knew it could cure him
Would you do the same if the chance of curing or killing him is 50:50?
Or if it’s uncertain that it works at all?
BriggyDwiggs42 · 40d ago
People use drugs in prisons, so I doubt the wellness farms are gonna be able to keep drugs out, much less help people.
snotrockets · 39d ago
The problem is the camps. It's forces framing certain traits as something that requires exiling people who show them.
qingcharles · 40d ago
The profit margin on drugs is good. I think it would take about zero days before "remote location" is programmed into the Google Maps of several local dealers.
I've been in max security prisons. There are generally far more drugs inside these than I've ever seen in the outside world.
I don't want to piss on rehab too much, it can work. But for every decent rehab facility there are probably 100 bogus ones.
Also remember, that to an addict who has been to prison, rehab feels like prison. It has the same locked-down, heavy-on-the-rules design that can cause serious PTSD issues for (practically everyone) who suffers some sort of trauma from being incarcerated.
lynx97 · 40d ago
Not just parents. Its a method that actual addicts employ. I have heard this not only once. "Moved a few months to a rural place where I had no access to the stuff to get my system clean" is a tactic that people turn to. Heck, one example I am thinking of even moved from the USA to Europe in the 90s to get rid of his crack addiction.
BriggyDwiggs42 · 40d ago
1) its not a camp with a bunch of other addicts, who would most certainly procure the stuff and make it available
2) its entirely voluntary and non-coerced
InvisibleUp · 40d ago
There’s a webcomic, “Joe vs. Elan School”, that might be an enlightening read for you.
silisili · 40d ago
This actually resonates a bit with my own thoughts from these comments.
If we assume a drug abuser is doomed for death in the next 6 months. But by using them as slave labor in terrible conditions for 3 years guarantees they will live to old age, regardless of any psychological trauma from said experience, is it worth it?
I'm not taking a position, I'm just making a thought experiment. It's more of a moral philosophical thing than an answer, I guess.
I think a lot of people not in the midwest may not understand the gravity of the fentanyl problem in the US. Literally every family is affected, whether directly or indirectly.
rendx · 40d ago
What makes it so that some people/cultures seem to value age over anything else? If their lives continue to be miserable, broken inside, violent temper thanks to being treated like a slave, a long life to me sounds more like a punishment than a goal.
It's basically a religious war. One side seems to think they need to "break people's spirit" by "work camps", the other side seems to believe in "healing from violence" by compassion. You're free to pick your side, but it's going to get harder to switch, and the other side will treat you as their enemy.
BriggyDwiggs42 · 40d ago
Your thought experiment, the drug dealer being universally doomed, the only consequence being a state of slavery for a finite time, etc has no relation to reality.
dns_snek · 40d ago
> is it worth it?
The answer is a very obvious "no" in any society that claims to be free.
> I'm not taking a position
Frankly it's terrifying that these sorts of questions are being posed as real dilemmas in western societies in 2025.
snotrockets · 40d ago
He has no heart. He is cruel, as he subscribes to the idea that a disease isn’t something you get because you rolled the dice wrong, but something that can be avoided by being “pure”. For him, pure health is never systematic or unlucky; the person is at fault.
This is not only immoral and vile, but borders on the psychopathic. The man should have never been allowed to make any decision affecting public health.
viraptor · 40d ago
Before downvoting, do look at many available yt videos about his views of mental health. He puts that into much nicer words, but the comment is a good summary.
whacko_quacko · 40d ago
I had a drug problem once, and di something like that. It helped a lot. If there's no way to procure any drugs, it takes away a lot of the pain and anguish you feel coming off of drugs.
RFK might be an idiot, but even idiots might be right once in a while
mschuster91 · 40d ago
> If there's no way to procure any drugs, it takes away a lot of the pain and anguish you feel coming off of drugs.
Or the fact that you're not longer in the environment with its stressors that cause you to seek out drugs in the first place? Lots of people sleeping rough go for drugs of any kind just to be able to put their mind to rest.
Finland shows this with its "housing first" policy, giving people a home is a relatively easy way to get them off of drugs.
bitwize · 40d ago
That's how kids end up at Elan School.
The current administration is setting up a modern day Spiegelgrund.
hayst4ck · 40d ago
Not to mention that many farms will be lacking migrant labor due to mass deportations.
"Work will set you free from your addiction."
creddit · 40d ago
In what historical context was “wellness farm” used as a euphemism?
froh · 40d ago
would you, in the context of fascist Germany or other totalitarian regimes with concentration camps, not understand the quoted text as cynical euphemism for such camps?
this understanding of metaphors is not that it was used then. the understanding happens today a contemporary application of historical knowledge.
and honestly, it's obvious.
vasco · 40d ago
It's not after that fact, or any euphemism - this is the exact way the regime tried to pass them off at the time. Germany called the concentration camps luxurious places to hangout and learn skills and rehabilitate, with post office, frequent movie screenings, a swimming pool, nice beds. The reality was much different as we know. They did have a small pool on the grounds for show.
Your source for this is an article that takes down a description from a book that was written in 2010. Not sure if you quite caught that on your thorough reading of it.
vasco · 40d ago
I just wanted to find some supporting information, what I know about this I know from visiting the camp myself so I didn't have an amazing source at hand.
froh · 40d ago
wow. TIL.
taneliv · 40d ago
Good for you! If only things like this were taught in schools so that by the time people find Hacker News, they'd already know about them. We would be having entirely different conversations.
creddit · 40d ago
Seems like a waste to update the curricula every few years to include, for example, some random lady who published a holocasut denail book in 2010 as referenced in that source. Doesn't seem very useful pedagogically!
froh · 40d ago
this gets me the wrong way. see, I live in Nuremberg, Germany. I went to school here, "higher education". I've learned a lot about fascism, how it lured voters into electing them, how they grabbed and secured power, how they introduced concentration camps ("animal protection" legislation, prohibiting kosher butchering, introduced the camps as punishment for those insisting on kosher law. twisted)
I've visited two concentration camp memorials, with their cynical writing at the gate.
I've read the Auschwitz documents edited by 2001 Verlag. I've watched the Holocaust movie series of the 1970s (way to early)
nonetheless, I was not aware of concentration camps being labeled as recreational leisure camps of some sort by the nazis.
my point being: it was no lack of education to not know that additional aspect of systematic brain sick evil.
creddit · 40d ago
AFAICT, this wasn't actually how the Germans framed the concentration camps at all. The article you responded to is about how a woman described them in 2010.
And this film was never even shown broadly as it was made near the end of the war. Also, it's technically for a ghetto and not a concentration camp.
No AI I've asked and no links I've found suggest that concentration camps were broadly propagandized as anything similar to "wellness farms".
vasco · 40d ago
What about this article from AP, Monday, April 24, 1933, doesn't say wellness farm, but it also isn't very accurate. Was a cursory search of contemporaneous articles and that popped up, probably not impossible to find more with similar descriptions. Enough to at least understand the message at the time was much softer than reality.
> Some 18,000 Germans from all walks of life are being held in the political concentration camps in various parts of the country.
> Wilhelm Frick, Prussian minister of the interior, explains that they will be kept there until they become "fit citizens," reconciled if not converted, to the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler.
> Sanitary conditions generally are described as excellent. There are doctors at each camp to care for the health of the inmates, and some of them report that the political prisoners are adepts [sic] at getting on morning "sick call."
> The physical culture includes morning setting-up exercises, football matches and similar group games. The manual labor is mostly tidying up the camp premises and barracks, but there are odd Jobs too, such as sewing or painting swastika emblems on confiscated Communist flags.
> Taeglische Rundschau sees political ideas of tomorrow coming from the concentration camps of today. Quoting a prisoner as saying "Sure we'd like to get out; but this is a good enough place to think things over," the paper comments:
LOL yeah this really paints them in a positive light. If this is the best resource you have for how the Nazis propagandized their concentration camps (this is literally right after the earliest ones opened so you would expect whatever propaganda to be as strong as possible then) as “luxurious” then I’m going to land on that not being the case.
> At most of the camps privileges are few. Major Kauffman, head of the big Heuberg camp in Wuerttemberg, said his prisoners were allowed to write one letter a month. There are no visiting days there.
It literally even calls them political concentration camps in the article.
vasco · 39d ago
You seem to treat this topic with a strange lightness.
creddit · 38d ago
My "LOL" is at people condescendingly trying to prove things like "Germany called the concentration camps luxurious places to hangout and learn skills and rehabilitate, with post office, frequent movie screenings, a swimming pool, nice beds" with sources which repeatedly don't do that in any way.
vasco · 38d ago
I guess anything we don't agree with can sound condescending but I assure you I thought I was relaying accurate information gotten at the place the things happened. I saw the pool and the guide had a whole bit about the Germans doing news stories there to prove how good it was. Maybe the guide was politically motivated, I guess, and I was just gullible, but the second article I shared definitely seems to paint a much rosier picture of the camps than starving people fighting for survival every day. And it doesn't sound surprising to me that people would lie about it being nicer? Is there maybe some deeper point that is annoying you in this imprecision that I'm missing?
froh · 39d ago
there was "exemplary" KZ Theresienstadt which was used to pretend these camps were educational facilities, quite successfully so for some period of time.
creddit · 39d ago
Fascinating. Never heard of it. What did you think about the source I linked to?
froh · 39d ago
the source is good, the book it reviews is abysmal. spreading it, publishing it and writing it constitute crimes according to German penal code.
Which if you had clicked and read you would see comes from the US Holocaust museum and is heavily focused on Theresienstadt. I was making a point that you're not really interested in engaging with anything I'm writing and are instead focused on just getting your own point across as evidenced by your use of "Theresienstadt" as a point in reply.
froh · 38d ago
srry for the confusion.
the 2010 "source" further above is abysmal Holocaust denial.
your source (ushmm) of course is not.
I got confused on the small smart phone display about who I was responding to.
apologies again.
Fluorescence · 40d ago
>> I've watched the Holocaust movie series of the 1970s
Do you recall Karl is sent to Theresienstadt where the art studio secretly paints the holocaust?
That is the "paradise ghetto", the potemkin village concentration camp the Nazis created to give tours to international observers to fool them about conditions. Sometimes called a retirement village or the gift of the Fuhrer to the Jewish people but of course, just a temporary pause for transports going further east to the death camps.
I only have nightmare memories, I was way too young to process what I saw :-(
I also found the Reichsparteitagsgelände (Nazi Party Rally Grounds) permanent exhibition the most useful content I was exposed to: they really show how fake news on all available channels and mega-church style mass entertainment were key to overturn a democracy and enable the atrocities. that and first bullying and then eradication of opposition.
I'd really hope US up their resistance and democracy protection game at this point in time. I'm afraid. As in existential fear.
creddit · 40d ago
Oh so you mean it wasn’t used that way in a historical context? Got it.
froh · 40d ago
no I was explaining what understanding in historic context means.
edit: ...also I didn't know it was even used this way, back then, see my TIL reply in some "cousin" comment.
creddit · 40d ago
If by "back then", you mean 2010, then yeah.
But if you still mean that the specific term "wellness farm" COULD have been used as a euphemism for concentration camps (regardless of whether or not it ever was), then what's the point? Like people also COULD have used the term "suburb" as euphemism for a concentration camp. Should we also be skeptical of anyone who says they want to build suburbs? What's even the point of of saying that a term COULD have been used as euphemism historically?
Aeolun · 40d ago
Do you read ‘wellness farm’ and think it is something literal?
If it was a well accepted term it’d be one thing, but when made up on the spot it very much sounds like “place we sen out undesirables” to me.
BriggyDwiggs42 · 40d ago
Current day
BlackjackCF · 40d ago
If RFK’s comments were made in isolation, I wouldn’t be so worried.
However, you put it in context with the fact that this administration has shipped off people to an El Salvadoran prison without any due process… this becomes a lot more ominous.
jrflowers · 40d ago
I like that you scrolled past the relevant paragraph here and then quoted a different thing that he said as proof that the paragraph that you ignored didn’t exist. I’m curious as to why you would bother including a real quote from the article? If your starting point for crafting a post is “Nobody will read the article I’m talking about” the sky is the limit, you could say he said anything you like.
samsm1737337 · 40d ago
Well, all I am going to take from this after reading some of the replies is that there is a slight change that the Brainwormguy is going to send the Rocketmann to a farm upstate. I can live with that.
rswail · 40d ago
Considering he has been a lifelong addict to various drugs, with endless wealth to be sent to "wellness farms", I'd take his opinion on how to treat any disease with the same perspective as I would any other drug-addled, brain-holed, rich narcissist, that caused his wife to commit suicide.
In other words, his opinion isn't worth the electronic bits needed to spread them.
croes · 40d ago
First you can go and leave as you like, then you can go but can’t leave, then you have to go.
Given the things he said about vaccines and bird flu, I wouldn’t trust him an inch.
creddit · 40d ago
Yes and some of the links to the “traumatizing” deportations are for people who are clearly in violation of their visas.
I had a friend deported from Denmark when he overstayed his visa and it was basically the same thing.
Some of these look really bad and could be sensible justification for the proposed boycott/cancellation (see French scientist eg) but a lot of it looks completely hysterical.
someothherguyy · 40d ago
> a lot of it looks completely hysterical
Some bad history with executive orders / The Alien Enemies Act and interning people in the US:
Because two weeks in jail what could be a simple flight home sounds fishy.
And I wouldn’t want to gamble if I‘m one of the unlucky ones that you described as looking bad.
That kind of uncertainty is exactly what makes those travels unnecessarily dangerous.
That’s not hysterical it‘s cautious.
creddit · 40d ago
I don’t quite remember and would have to ask. I think he was detained for 5 days, maybe?
> Because two weeks in jail what could be a simple flight home sounds fishy.
The inefficiency of American institutions is nearly limitless. Don’t put too much stock in the glacial pace of our bureaucracy as being malicious when it happens everywhere else out of broad incompetence.
> That’s not hysterical it‘s cautious.
Again, I agree that there are a few stories of deportations that are legitimate causes for concern about hosting a conference with internationals in the US. But if you use people getting deported for overstaying their visas as a part of justifying that concern, then that is hysterical. It conflates issues that are effectively totally unrelated to one another.
It would be like claiming it’s not safe to travel to Italy because the local justice systems will charge you with trumped up charges and quote both the Amanda Knox case as well as cases where Americans actually broke the law and got charged justly. Only the Amanda Knox case is actual justification for the claim!
Timwi · 40d ago
> The inefficiency of American institutions is nearly limitless. Don’t put too much stock in the glacial pace of our bureaucracy as being malicious when it happens everywhere else out of broad incompetence.
Correct me if I'm misreading this, but it sounds like you're saying that inefficiencies due to incompetence are exempt from criticism.
It should go without saying that detaining innocent people is BAD, regardless of whether it's malice or incompetence.
creddit · 39d ago
I’m not saying it’s exempt from criticism and honestly I don’t know how that could possibly be an interpretation of that. I’m literally calling it incompetent which is clearly criticism. I’m saying that a 2wk detention due to glacial pace of our shitty bureaucracy isn’t really “fishy” about anything.
And to be clear, they aren’t innocent in the referenced example. They were breaking the terms of their visa.
q3k · 40d ago
> The inefficiency of American institutions is nearly limitless. Don’t put too much stock in the glacial pace of our bureaucracy as being malicious when it happens everywhere else out of broad incompetence.
The purpose of a system is what it does.
creddit · 39d ago
This is one of the dumbest things people say constantly.
Remember this the next time you ship a bug! You built a system whose purpose was to have that bug in it.
q3k · 39d ago
If my system regularly ships bugs, then yes, it's purpose is apparently to regularly ship bugs. If my system ships rarely bugs, then yes, it's purpose is apparently to rarely ship bugs.
creddit · 39d ago
> If my system regularly ships bugs, then yes, it's purpose is apparently to regularly ship bugs. If my system ships rarely bugs, then yes, it's purpose is apparently to rarely ship bug
Genius stuff here. Crazy how many people use an operating system whose literal purpose according to you is to ship bugs.
q3k · 39d ago
And that's why a lot of us are pushing to change the system by eg. making it use a memory safe language. Otherwise it's gonna keep producing more bugs than it should :).
none_to_remain · 39d ago
The purpose of that meme is to annoy me with its inanity
qingcharles · 40d ago
I've known people get caught up for months in immigration detention over simple snafus. I've also known several people who were literally just turned around at the gate and shoveled straight onto the next flight home. There are thousands of border points, and thousands of border agents, so I'm guessing there is an element of luck depending on where you appear.
Aeolun · 40d ago
All of those things look like they’re about being detained for several weeks when trying to enter the US? Why wouldn’t they just refuse you entry instead?
jeltz · 40d ago
Yeah, why detain and treat people badly when you should just send them back home on the first available flight and then ban them from using the ESTA program? The pointless and expensive cruelty is the issue.
anfilt · 40d ago
RISC-V moved to Switzerland as well a while ago. I think it's a shame to see stuff like this happening. Regardless, of where one stands currently in the current environment making standards bodies want to move or move events to other countries is not a good.
tossandthrow · 40d ago
Regardless of the political situation, the EU is probably a more friendly environment for a standards body taking their stance in interoperability into account.
p4coder · 40d ago
It depends on your citizenship. Some European countries reject 50% Indian Schengen visa applicantions.
More importantly, and according to your link, only Estonia rejected 50+% Indian applications, everyone else rejected less than 50%, with only 2 others anywhere near 50% (Malta and Slovenia).
So out of 29 countries in the Schengen area only 3 were anywhere near the 50% mark and all 3 are tiny countries as far as both area and populations are concerned (those 3 combined account for only 4 million people in total).
Also, just to take one of those 3, Estonia has an overall high rejection rate in comparison to all the others, and that started happening after the pandemic.
Details are important
skissane · 38d ago
> Schengen is different from EU.
Schengen isn't "different from EU". It originally was separate from EU, but since 1999 has been an aspect of the EU. Per Wikipedia:
> Originally, the Schengen treaties and the rules adopted under them operated independently from the European Union. However, in 1999 they were incorporated into European Union law by the Amsterdam Treaty, while providing opt-outs for the only two EU member states that had remained outside the Area: Ireland and the United Kingdom (which subsequently withdrew from the EU in 2020). Schengen is now a core part of EU law, and all EU member states without an opt-out which have not already joined the Schengen Area are legally obliged to do so when technical requirements have been met. Several non-EU countries are included in the area through special association agreements.
"Several non-EU countries are included in the area through special association agreements."
skissane · 37d ago
Yes, but the inclusion of a non-EU country in an EU programme as a special exception (not unique to Schengen) doesn’t thereby make it a non-EU programme, which is a natural interpretation of what you said
ABS · 36d ago
I never wrote that Schengen "is not an EU programme", I pointed out succintly that the countries in Schengen and the countries in EU are not the same thing.
In fact there are also EU countries NOT in Schengen. And there are countries in Europe but not in the EU which are not in Schengen either.
Jolter · 40d ago
At least they don’t issue you a visa and then arbitrarily detain you at the border.
Obtaining a work visa in a particular country is not a human right, and their issuance are up to the hosting country’s policies.
laserlight · 40d ago
> work visa
I would guess that 90% of the applications were for travel, not work.
> their issuance are up to the hosting country’s policies
These countries don't even bother to apply their policies. Some cases I heard about indicate that they randomly reject applications, without reviewing them.
Jolter · 40d ago
Ah, you’re right. The linked article doesn’t say, but apparently a Schengen Visa is “for short-term purposes, such as tourism or business trips. Work permits are apparently not counted in these numbers, then.
As to whether they are conforming tot heir own policies or not, I can’t find any evidence either way in the linked article. They’re just stating the numbers.
dtquad · 40d ago
>Estonia, Malta and Slovenia rejected the highest percentage of Schengen visa applications from India last year, while Germany, Italy and Hungary were most accommodating.
Sounds like Estonia, Malta, and Slovenia didn't want their countries to become transits for illegal immigration from India to the UK.
Countries like Germany get legitimate Indian immigration for work and higher education so their rejection rate is lower.
dtquad · 40d ago
Not all EU countries are the same. I would avoid Hungary, Slovakia, and former Eastern Germany (except Berlin).
Jolter · 40d ago
As far a I know, all of the listed countries are reasonably safe to travel to. I’ve not heard any stories of arbitrary detention from any of them, which is what this article is (mostly) about.
Trans people might not enjoy Slovakia or Hungary right now, but I’m not sure they are unsafe to visit for them (yet)? Someone local might fill me in here…
asmor · 40d ago
Hungary just criminalized pride. Their political leadership seems more aligned with Putin than the EU at this time.
Yeah, I've seen that. It's been well documented that they are slipping into authoritarianism, nationalism and even a dictatorship. Free speech is not really in place anymore. I was just not very well informed about how civil liberies for trans people look, specifically. Whether the country is safe to travel to for conferences being the issue at hand. I see on Wikipedia that Orban has ended "legal recognition of transgender Hungarians", which I guess is probably significative of the trend, if nothing else.
blackeyeblitzar · 39d ago
It’s not unsafe for anyone to visit the US either. Unless you’re violating the law in some way, like presenting false documents or overstaying a visa - in which case there would be consequences like in any other country. Sure mistakes can happen on rare occasions, like in any country, but “arbitrary” detention isn’t a thing. That’s just sensationalism from a biased news media that has no idea why anyone was denied or detained, since that isn’t public information.
Jolter · 39d ago
I don’t know if you’ve read about it but apparently if a trans woman has “F” in her passport and a border agent determines that she was previously a man, that’s now considered fraudulent and grounds for detention and deportation.
Jolter · 39d ago
Overstaying a visa in any other (developed) country does not result in this kind of detention. These people are not even being given due process. I’m sure each of them is detained for some mistake in their paperwork, but some of these stories are really not flattering to the ICE.
skissane · 38d ago
> Overstaying a visa in any other (developed) country does not result in this kind of detention.
The US doesn't have a monopoly on immigration horror stories: Australian immigration illegally detained an Australian citizen for 10 months. [0] They illegally deported another Australian citizen to the Philippines, and when they discovered their mistake, their initial response was to cover it up rather than try to rectify it. [1]
Hungary probably due to Orban, while Slovakia has ultra-nationalistic party in coalition.
I would evade Germany, Austria and also Italy in general, due to common racism against slavic people.
pesho · 40d ago
They're one of the best places in Europe right now, actually.
sschueller · 40d ago
Switzerland is not in the EU.
babayega2 · 40d ago
But it is in the Schengen area. I have a 1 year Schengen visa and I have been going there regularly without problem.
tossandthrow · 40d ago
You are right!
I could have said Switzerland, but I believe that my point expands to the entirety of the EU, why I expanded a bit.
As some of you sibling commenters also write: Not all parts of the Schengen / EU is equally - just like you probably wouldn't move these things to rural Alaska.
thomasfedb · 40d ago
Singapore and Australia might also be on the list.
clarionbell · 40d ago
Unless you make a mistake of bringing cannabis.
Jolter · 40d ago
If you’re saying that being able to legally bring cannabis into a country is a test for whether the IETF can host their meetings there… I don’t know if that is accurate.
Sure, Singapore has draconian laws when it comes to narcotics. But surely everyone attending will be aware of this? It’s been widely reported over the decades how foreign nationals have gotten life sentences or even the death penalty for drug running. What I’m saying is that Singapore are up front about it and it’s not enforced arbitrarily. Leaving your personal stash at home and abstaining for a few days should hopefully not be too difficult for the attendant engineers.
eqvinox · 39d ago
Or being gay in Singapore.
Wait, holy shit, it was legalized in 2022. Didn't know. Nice!
eagleislandsong · 39d ago
The law -- a relic from British colonialisation -- criminalising homosexuality between men (not women, by the way) was never enforced anyway.
eqvinox · 39d ago
I am aware of that, but the fact that it was still on the books matters. For one, it has psychological impact, and for another if some police officer in a bad mood doesn't like your face geometry or number of thumbs, things like this can become 'power trip utilities' even if they're thrown out a few hours later.
eagleislandsong · 39d ago
Those are very fair points. I too am glad that the law was repealed.
I frequently get the impression that the policymakers in Singapore are more progressive than they reveal, but are extremely cautious about loosening up because they don't want to antagonise certain voter groups (e.g. people of certain religious persuasions). It is quite telling that the law was repealed in its entirety only in 2023, one year before the former Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong stepped down from his position.
defrost · 39d ago
It's true that since 2007 charges have been laid by the police in a few cases, these have been challenged, and variously overturned or thrown out from court.
So, enforcement was certainly attempted and people were certainly detained for periods of time and forced to defend against charges that were laid.
It's not readily clear how often charges under Section 377 (1860-) or Section 377A (1938-) were laid in Singapore prior to 2007 (or of the charges laid how many cases came to trial and how many convictions occurred).
Clarification: the “not new” part is foreign attendees not being able to attend conferences in the U.S. So, if you valued inclusion, holding international conferences in the U.S. has been a bad idea for a long time.
leftcenterright · 40d ago
Being detained is way worse than being denied entry.
> I was then placed in a real jail unit: two levels of cells surrounding a common area, just like in the movies. I was put in a tiny cell alone with a bunk bed and a toilet.
> The best part: there were blankets. After three days without one, I wrapped myself in mine and finally felt some comfort.
How is this not "new at all"? I just don't understand why some people are so blind to the ongoing abuse of power. What a shame!
Timwi · 40d ago
> I just don't understand why some people are so blind to the ongoing abuse of power. What a shame!
They're not blind to it. They either like it and want it (sometimes because they benefit from it), or they're indifferent to it because it doesn't affect them personally. I know — it's really hard to appreciate the mindset of people with no empathy.
asmor · 40d ago
Don't forget the concern trolls that imply doubt of it happening at all, and then downplay the severity if you dig a little. We have some in this very thread, deploying their "scare quotes".
oefrha · 40d ago
That exact same article says someone has been tossed around in that system for ten months. That’s just someone among the 100-200 people they met. That same article even has photos of the system from the 2000s. There’s a photo of people sleeping on the floor wrapped in the exact kind of aluminum sheet “blankets” dated 2014. It’s been going on for very long. (Btw, I suspect it’s only getting attention now that the more-equal-than-others groups are also getting the same treatment, but I’m not going to push that point.)
And I was very clear about which part is “not new”. What a shame people can’t read. What a shame partisan commenters read “U.S. has been blah blah for a long time” and immediately jump to “Trump defender!!!”
The links you shared in your original comment all pointed to "rejections", not "legal people being detained".
What has always been going on: people overstay their visa, depending on the scale and country, people get treated badly almost always in these cases.
What is happening now: people being critical of Trump are being rejected, legal visa holders are being detained because of the scale of the abuse.
These are clearly very different things and very much a fault of specifically Trump administration. Searching phones and messages to look for Trump critical messages .. unbelievable and totally new stuff is going on here: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/19/trump-musk-f...
oefrha · 40d ago
> ... now: ... legal visa holders are being detained
I disagree. These legal visa holders are caught for small (or slightly larger) infractions, like a previous visa revocation due to running a cannabis business, sort of working (helping?) on a non-work visa, obviously planning to work on a non-work visa, etc. These could always (at least after 911?) land you in big trouble in the U.S. if you have the wrong nationality and/or skin color. I believe these were almost completely ignored by (mainstream) press because most Americans won't sympathize with them, they are obviously illegals, criminals, terrorists, etc. Now that Canadians/Western Europeans are caught in the system, suddenly people with the same infractions or suspected infractions are obviously legal visa holders.
I personally know someone with the wrong nationality and wrong color who was detained at the border (maybe not technically "detained"? let's say held) for no apparent reason for hours and got their devices searched, then released and allowed to enter. That was either 2013 or 2014. Thankfully not weeks or months.
The only fundamental change now is the bar is lowered and sympathizable (to most Westerners) people are being caught in it.
And I maintain that people who actually valued inclusion shouldn't have held conferences in the U.S. since a long time ago, if ever.
pas · 39d ago
Complete disregard for any kind of due process for a Canadian seems absolutely new. (Either she's a criminal and they charge her or she's not, and ... escort her to the airport as she said she is willing to go and pay for the flight. Suddenly treating people like enemy combatants, telling them absolutely nothing of importance, is ....)
I agree with your "this didn't start yesterday" view and with the "holding US conferences was always less than maximally inclusive" (for example because it was fucking expensive to go to Las Vegas, and because the phone searches, and ... in general the whole border patrol can do anything for miles around ports of entry)
But many things can be true at the same time. Trump found his paramilitary troops, the scale of the operation(s) and the source of the cruelty being the White House seems new. (At least since Nixon/Contra.)
blackeyeblitzar · 39d ago
> What is happening now: people being critical of Trump are being rejected, legal visa holders are being detained because of the scale of the abuse.
The agencies don’t reveal reasons why someone was denied or detained, so there is no evidence whatsoever that someone was detained for being critical of Trump. The claim that this happened is from Philippe Baptiste, a French minister for higher education who has been attacking America continuously in a bid to attract researchers from the US.
leftcenterright · 36d ago
Isn't simply the act of going through one's phone offensive enough? 0 regard for human dignity and privacy and people defending it is shocking.
leftcenterright · 36d ago
> Another AFP source said that US authorities accused the French researcher of “hateful and conspiratorial messages”.
cmurf · 39d ago
People aren't blind to the abuse. They want plausible deniability, permitting them to opt out of the duty and responsibility attached to citizenship. Therefore the metaphor is flawed: blind suggests an inability. People are capable of understanding what's happening, and are choosing to be a spectator, and not a citizen.
What are they waiting for? To see if they will come out ahead. It's classic rebel's dilemma.
Eventually the truth will catch up to us all. We'll undeniably realize this is a tyrannical movement that intends to replace the Constitutional order without the consent of the governed.
In no universe is the election of a dictator equivalent to 3/4 of the state legislatures ratifying an amendment to the Constitution.
black_puppydog · 40d ago
Getting a visa to travel to conferences was one of the major blockers for non-EU citizens during my studies. It was heartbreaking to see people work for years on a subject, finally get accepted to a top conference, and then not be able to go and present just because the visa was impossible to get in time or was simply refused.
However, these cases were rejections of visa. And even Stenberg's case was about being denied entry, not arbitrary detainment and torture like we see now. IMHO this wave of cases is a change in quantity that results in a change of quality already. But the quality of the rejection/detainment has changed as well.
mmooss · 40d ago
The first isn't the same at all: Chinese scientists were prevented from attending based on an official government policy, not randomly arrested and detained.
The second and third are the same incident, from the prior Trump administration. But the visa was denied; nobody was arrested or detained.
oefrha · 40d ago
People are randomly arrested and detained base on official government policy. And they have been arresting and detaining people long before Jan 2024, but it was scaled up recently. A recent story made it clear that some people with minor visa overstays have already been detained for months: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43410548
The fact is if you care about people from all around the world being able to attend your conference, the U.S. hasn’t been a good location for a long time. That’s not new. In fact [2][3] is only noteworthy because it was an influential individual (in this circle) with a strong passport; people with weaker passports are routinely denied. Hell sometimes UN diplomats are denied.
mmooss · 40d ago
> People are randomly arrested and detained base on official government policy.
Right, but you did not give examples of that happening previously.
oefrha · 40d ago
Once again, when I say “not new” I’m talking about
> The fact is if you care about people from all around the world being able to attend your conference, the U.S. hasn’t been a good location for a long time.
TFA says
> As an Internet community we strive to include everyone. Holding a meeting in the US is incompatible with our values.
It’s been incompatible with their values for very long.
jeltz · 40d ago
You are arguing with someone who agrees with you but wanted to point out that your examples were bad and did not support your position that well.
oefrha · 40d ago
No, I’m arguing with someone who thinks I’m saying arbitrary arrests are not new (in fact I believe those aren’t new either, but I’m not arguing that and can’t be bothered to dig up sources), when I’m saying not being able to attend conferences in the U.S. is not new.
leftcenterright · 40d ago
> “This measure was apparently taken by the American authorities because the researcher’s phone contained exchanges with colleagues and friends in which he expressed a personal opinion on the Trump administration’s research policy,” the minister added.
I don't think this has been a basis for denying entry to people in past?
tczMUFlmoNk · 40d ago
Thank you. I am in the U.S. and am threatened by these measures. I'm not a member of the IETF, but I rely on their work heavily, and the solidarity is meaningful.
eqvinox · 39d ago
(off-topic but common misconception that should be corrected:) IETF doesn't have "members". You just show up on the mailing lists or meetings and sometimes do productive shit, other times get into massive bikeshedding and almost-flamewars. It works surprisingly well but does have its issues.
People do take you more seriously if you've been around for a while and they know you aren't full of shit, but that's just social dynamics.
bloppe · 40d ago
This website mixes some very real and very big problems (erosion of basic freedoms and rights in the US) with some entirely hallucinated ones (concentration camps for people with ADHD, and torture? I'd certainly want to learn more about that than a passing mention).
Personally I think the hyperbole only serves to cheapen the real problems.
Translation via DeepL:
"The German's mother made serious accusations against the immigration authorities in the US media. She told NHPR in New Hampshire that officers had "violently interrogated" her son for hours. He had to strip naked and was forced to take a cold shower by two officers before being put back in his chair. He was then taken to a room with other people in bright light and was given hardly any food or water. He was also denied access to his medication. According to his mother, the man eventually collapsed and was taken to hospital. It later turned out that he had the flu."
asmor · 40d ago
The government employees at these border crossing definitely feel too confident that whatever they do will get covered up or ignored by the people above them. And all trust I ever had in the forth estate - nationally and internationally - has gone with this entire mess of a presidency too. They mostly seem to parrot each other's assurances that things that are happening are completely normal, or at least understate heavily. I'm happy outliers exist, including some unexpected ones like Wired Magazine.
gaudystead · 39d ago
WIRED Magazine crawling out of the pits of being a glorified collection of advertisements to having quality journalism pieces about tech related news was not something I was expecting for these times, but I'm happy to have been pleasantly surprised.
Americans should learn that solitary detention is torture. Check out all the effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solitary_confinement Also support for genocide is major international crime, btw, which is another crime Americans are very blasé about, while commiting it.
hayst4ck · 40d ago
This is an administration that openly is talking about annexing Canada, as well as invading panama and Greenland. It's an administration that has literally said "we want government workers in trauma."
3-4 prominent republicans have Sieg Heiled in public, including Bannon who did not put his hand on his heart first.
You are confusing hyperbole for actually shocking news, and it's so shocking it's easily mistaken for hyperbole because if you don't bury your head in the ground it's too much to bear. Accepting the truth of whats happening means you must act, and so people are opting not to accept it to protect their mental health.
"I'm going to bring a new industry to [rural] America, where addicts can help each other recover from their addictions," Kennedy promised, during a film on addiction released by his presidential campaign. "We're going to build hundreds of healing farms where American kids can reconnect with America's soil."
That's the kernel of truth, but when you bring in the historical context of authoritarian regimes, and the absolute lack of rule of law, you start to get very very afraid.
cmurf · 39d ago
In the 1965 book Night of Camp David the president's cabinet realized he was insane because of his fixation on annexing Canada.
In 2025 Americans are so anesthetized even the "opposition party" can't say the obvious out loud in public. Let alone the president's cabinet.
People voting for a dictator isn't equivalent to 3/4 of the legislatures ratifying an amendment to the Constitution. The People have not given consent to set aside the Constitutional order.
If the People want to set aside the Constitution, they must do the hard work of convincing enough people in enough states to do it lawfully. Otherwise it's settled with might makes right.
For all the flaws of the founding fathers they definitely understood power. How it gets consolidated. And how to fragment it. Their advice is polyarchy.
What we're witnessing is autogolpe to establish a CEO-dictator, the consolidation of power. In no universe are Trump, Vance, Musk, Thiel, Yarvin on the right side of history. And they will fail.
dragonwriter · 39d ago
> If the People want to set aside the Constitution, they must do the hard work of convincing enough people in enough states to do it lawfully.
No, they don't.
They just need to obey a government that ignores its Constitutional bounda.
> Otherwise it's settled with might makes right.
It's always settled that way. Legality isn't a substitute for might makes right, it is, a social mechanism for guiding where the “might” ends up. But if the people—who ultimately, are the muscles of the might—decide not to care about legality, than it doesn't matter any more. Words written on paper are not self enforcing.
hayst4ck · 38d ago
> If the People want to set aside the Constitution
No, the constitution has a maintenance cost. The constitution is already set aside if people are not willing to pay that maintenance cost. Solidarity is the price of freedom.
Despotism is the default state you will get when you don't pay upkeep to your institutions.
hayst4ck · 38d ago
> The People have not given consent to set aside the Constitutional order.
Inaction is largely indistinguishable from consent.
> autogolpe
No. We are experience Russian backed regime change in the same way we have instituted regime change in other countries, amplified by tried and true propaganda techniques used to propel other authoritarian regimes to power.
> CEO-dictator
This is a deliberate new age propaganda technique using conceptual metaphors (see George Lakoff).
"The CEO metaphor re-frames political rule as a business operation, which makes executive overreach appear logical rather than dangerous."
By getting someone to accept the metaphor of CEO, it manifests consent for executive overreach without having directly assessed how accurate "president as CEO" is as a metaphor.
> In no universe are Trump, Vance, Musk, Thiel, Yarvin on the right side of history.
Complete darwinism/social darwinism is a cogent and consistent moral system. It doesn't produce a world anyone should want to live in, but it is a consistent ideology. Social darwinism was the philosophical core of nazi ideology. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/09/24/hitlers-world/
singularity2001 · 40d ago
Gitmo is still active (!?)
danielscrubs · 40d ago
European here, no one should take that website seriously. It’s full of incoherent ramblings.
Im a bit disappointed in HN for ranking it so high.
Time to take a look at the bot detection algo?
HexDecOctBin · 40d ago
@dang Why is this flagged? Even without the politics, knowing that a large cohort is not going to attend in an important piece of information.
GeoAtreides · 40d ago
there is another, better UI for HN:
https://hn.algolia.com/
set it for the last 24 hours and enjoy uncensored content
It's always fun when you make something only to realize it already exists. It's a pain that I'm sure you know as well.
gosub100 · 39d ago
It's flagged because it's one-sided political activism. I mostly support the first EO that is on that front page. What am I supposed to do? 1) Post here and defend it, then get in a flame war with people who disagree? 2) bite my lip because we're not supposed to support Trump's actions? I'm not allowed to support the elected president because it's not popular?
I'm sure there's a left-leaning tech group you can join where everyone agrees with you. But this post doesn't belong here, and neither do flame wars.
redbeanpandas · 40d ago
This is insane, everything that criticize US and current gov is flagged. Really disappointing and frightening. As a European citizen who reads European news, it was really strange not to see topics about the deterioration of US relations with its allies and its closer ties with Russia on this site. It was major news in the EU and completely silent here.
eqvinox · 40d ago
To be fair, most of those are news, not hacker news. But I suspect the hacker relevant ones also got that treatment.
pas · 39d ago
I can easily sympathize with those who want HN to be some kind of bubble to where they can escape from the/their troubles. (Using the flag feature for this is not what I would do, or ever did.)
the fact that dang refuses to reinstate the thread even 6 hours later is worrying me, this is 100% a valid topic for HN
pas · 39d ago
He's not some kind of 0-24 robot, come on. (Yes, I also think it's HN related.)
spiderfarmer · 40d ago
I heard last night from my friend who works in astronomy that they decided to cancel their event in the US and let the US attendees travel to Europe instead.
I can’t get used to the fact that the US seems dead set on destroying its reputation in the world.
But with the direction the comment section of HN has taken over the last few years I’m sure there will be lots of commenters who will dismiss this as virtue signaling.
nextts · 40d ago
It is real. It is interesting, because I don't think US wars or international interference over the years have caused this effect but now people are avoiding the US for pure "look out for number 1" reasons. I.e. it isn't safe enough for them to enter and it ain't worth the risk for some conference, holiday or work thing.
croes · 40d ago
Because the wars didn‘t affect white people or people of certain countries
The targets usually have darker skin or are from countries far more east, but now it affects people like themselves.
eqvinox · 40d ago
Wondering why this is flagged. Sure, it's politics, but it's also a serious issue on one of the major internet SDOs. It's certainly relevant for "good hackers"?
asmor · 40d ago
Cowardice.
Fence-sitting these days is a political decision all by itself. Well, it always was, but now that we've established a new normal (that's not very normal) rooting for the status quo is even more partisan.
phtrivier · 40d ago
The tech community has an interesting role to play here - I wonder how long it will take for gafam to start having issues recruiting skilled foreigners (or simply flying them to the US for interviews.)
It's not too much of a problem now, as t
Big Tech is not in the "software business" so much as in the "laying off people to make the stock look good" ; but at some point they'll have to bring people in to actually write code.
Or, are they expexting LLMs to really make the bulk of the jobs?
Or maybe everything settles down in two years, and this is just a bout of neo-McCarthyism.
Time will tell. In the meantime, I guess Europe must not be that bad, if people are organizing conferences here instead of China or Dubai ?
praptak · 40d ago
They do hire in LCoL countries (hello from Warsaw). Whether this will make the dent I'm a bit skeptical though. Nobody flies candidates anymore.
I told the last recruiter flat out that it's no longer ethical for me to work for a US company but I don't think many people will do the same.
sam-cop-vimes · 40d ago
Hear hear. Great initiative. I am not in the US but I do feel threatened by the way the US is conducting itself these days. It's time for people working in tech to push back.
chgs · 40d ago
Half the people on HN either support what’s happening in the US now or say “doesn’t directly affect me so leave me out of it” as if this is an argument about yankees vs mets.
asmor · 40d ago
I feel like we took the wrong lessons from atrocities in history. We treat them like they happened before some special enlightenment that magically shields us from history repeating, so it's okay to face the early warning signs with apathy or paint anything as a difference in opinion. Surely someone will care when things escalate; surely there would be an outcry more loud than this if it was serious.
Maybe teaching about the holocaust should be accompanied with copies of daily newspapers from the late 1930s to demonstrate their mundanity.
greybox · 40d ago
Iceland is a nice halfway point between the EU and the American continent, its a 5 hour flight from Boston and a 3.5 hour flight from London, its not a bad place to consider
you don't exactly need to be beaten with a hose. that said:
- psychological manipulation through prolonged uncertainty and withholding information
- dehumanizing conditions like freezing cells with inadequate blankets
- sleep deprivation
- physical suffering during a 24-hour transfer between facilities while shackled and confined in a prison bus
- humiliation and degradation particularly during pregnancy testing procedures where she was forced to squat over a communal toilet with others present
- arbitrary detention without any timeframe without clear legal justification despite having an approved visa and no criminal record
megous · 40d ago
The German tattoo artist got 8 days of solitary confinement, like so many others in ICE detention, that ICE only ended after her mental breakdown and self-injury, and not out of ICE having respect for their own rules.
jeanlucas · 39d ago
> Senior described Schmidt being “violently interrogated” at Logan Airport for hours, and being stripped naked, put in a cold shower by two officials, and being put back onto a chair.
Regardless of your take on this, it's very interesting to see the UI components they're using. These look identical to the gov.uk system, but I wasn't aware of it being available for use outside of their government websites.
(Apart from the GDS Transport font, which is exclusive to GOV.UK websites)
jeanlucas · 39d ago
Well, I don't have a choice anyway. I'm latino and I don't look like an approved American. It is literally dangerous for me to go.
garfieldnate · 36d ago
It's kind of ingenuous to take RFK's views on drug rehabilitation options and re-state them as if people are being sent to re-education/concentration camps.
That said, I do find the US border incidents to be super scary. I don't blame people for not wanting to come.
theyinwhy · 40d ago
As the current US administration is breaching the ietf's own code of conduct [1] this should be a no brainer.
It should, but there is, understandably, a lot of inertia and disbelief that this is the new status quo. That, and obviously, as the pamflet points out, a lot of people assume that this won't happen to them.
And let's be honest, a lot of people do indeed feel that this will only happen to people who make mistakes in their visa application (knowingly or not), have tattoos (or travel with tattooing gear), participate in any form of activism, are transgender or otherwise queer, or any other reason not applicable to conservative/right-leaning, white, middle class or higher, educated white collar workers. Some people are quite comfortable with all this (I won't bother pointing out the historical parallels), and it does come down to privilege and having an approved political mindset.
And here's the really nasty thing: if you point this out, you run the risk of sounding exactly like the 'woke' bogeymen this administration is 'fighting'. Language and the imagery invoked have been hijacked to a fascinating but troubling degree.
hayst4ck · 40d ago
> disbelief that this is the new status quo
This is called denial or shock, which is a natural result of grief.
frakt0x90 · 39d ago
I support the initiative, but it seems half the respondents are trolls (Debby does Dallas, USAID Fake news, etc), which make it all look very unserious. I would recommend some moderation or validation.
dot1x · 36d ago
What an absolutely moronic website that spews factually inaccurate nonsense like concentration camps for ADHD sufferers.
anonfordays · 39d ago
If you're traveling internationally, do so legally and with the correct paperwork. This isn't too much to ask for. People freaking out because the US is finally enforcing its immigration laws is hilarious. This boycott page has some incredibly delusional takes. Follow the laws of the country your visiting and don't worry about it.
gabaix · 40d ago
> Some have been tortured.
Is there any evidence of this?
istjohn · 40d ago
> Senior described Schmidt being “violently interrogated” at Logan Airport for hours, and being stripped naked, put in a cold shower by two officials, and being put back onto a chair.
> She said Schmidt told her immigration agents pressured him to give up his green card. She said he was placed on a mat in a bright room with other people at the airport, with little food or water, suffered sleep deprivation, and was denied access to his medication for anxiety and depression.
> “He hardly got anything to drink. And then he wasn’t feeling very well and he collapsed,” said Senior.
> He was transported by ambulance to Mass General Hospital. He didn’t know it at the time, but he also had influenza.
Apologists don’t consider this torture. This type of treatment of innocent prisoners has been common for decades in America.
Jolter · 40d ago
It's torture even if applied to guilty people. But your point is valid, it's just "how to treat prisoners". Having no privacy on the toilet as a default is dehumanizing in itself but may not be torture, but sleep deprivation by strong lights and inadequate heating certainly is, according to most definitions of torture.
Everything felt like it was meant to break you. Nothing was explained to us. I wasn’t given a phone call. We were locked in a room, no daylight, with no idea when we would get out.
qingcharles · 40d ago
I just did 10 straight years of this. No daylight is common if the facility is strapped for land to build outdoor areas, or is inside a city where looking in or out would be discouraged. The hand towels they give you for showering suck.
I tried suing over those, but even though there is a statute saying they must be bath towels, laws in the USA don't necessarily have to be followed. There are two types of laws, mandatory and directory. Directory laws are laws that are just "if you wanna" and don't carry any weight. A large majority of laws governing prisoner rights are these type of laws and there is no enforcement mechanism when they are broken. [ironically these laws specifically use the word "shall" in their wording, but in most jurisdictions "shall" is legally read as "may" in the USA]
"The towel shall be made of cloth and be bath size."
arketyp · 40d ago
I understand the sentiment that the Trump administration is draconian, especially for people traveling from abroad considering the new border policy. But, pardon me, how is that executive order about sex a "threat"? Listed as the top issue undermines the credibility of this petition I think.
sterlind · 40d ago
if a post-op trans woman is arrested, she's denied access to HRT and sent to a men's prison, where she will be given to violent male inmates to pacify them. this is known as v-coding. even having a vagina doesn't exempt you from men's prison, it just makes you more likely to be repeatedly raped as the justice system grinds on. this was already the case in some US states but the EO makes it Federal.
the State Department has also announced that it considers sex markers that don't correspond to sex at birth to be fraudulent. ostensibly for the sports ban, but it actually applies to all visa applications and documentation.
combine those two facts with the administration's stated antipathy towards us, and the recent trend of Germans and Canadians being detained for weeks with no apparent cause, and I think you should see why trans women ought to avoid US travel right now.
jeltz · 40d ago
I have never understood the trans women in sports thing. I see why it could be unfair to allow them to compete but that is a thing I would like the sports associations to handle. Being born with a male body could be a big advantage in some sports but not in others. Why should our politicians micromanage sports rules? Especially to make them more restrictive. Let the sports associations handle this.
I hate this culture war micromanagment where politicians write moral laws for things where there should not be any law.
viraptor · 40d ago
Check out all the issues currently faced by people with either updated or X gender on their documents. Look at what happens with documents at government level that use even vaguely trans-related words. Do you get why people would see erasure like that as threat, given historical context?
tdeck · 40d ago
Just to add one more example, the anti-trans frenzy led someone to call the cops on a cisgender lesbian woman who was using the women's restroom, where the male cops barged in to arrest her:
It's a threat to transgender travellers; I know many in the tech industry. The U.S. is now denying entry visas to transgender travellers as well.
briandear · 40d ago
Who was denied a visa for being trans? Citation needed. Were they denied because they were trans, or were they denied for another reason but happened to be trans.
TheEnbyperor · 40d ago
The current advice from the German government to me (a trans woman) is that I am ineligible to enter the US and will be detained at the border for presenting 'fraudulently'.
account42 · 37d ago
You can get your documentation corrected an then enter.
crummy · 40d ago
If sex on your passport doesn't match your sex at birth then according to Marco Rubio you may have your visa rejected.
So it's very expensive to overfly the US without landing, and once you land you can't avoid immigration even if you are just transiting on your way to another country.
The overland fee is $61.75 per 100 nautical miles (and it's a lower $26.51 per 100 nautical miles)[1]. Is this really that high? Let's say a flight from Canada to Mexico has to cross 1600 nautical miles overland the US. That would cost 16 x 61.75 = $988. Isn't that pretty low? On a flight with 200 passengers, that's an extra $5 per passenger.
[1] https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/international_aviation/overf...
If the conference was originally going to be held on the west coast of the US then Vancouver would be an excellent alternative and if it was going to be held on the east coast then Montreal is another excellent alternative.
Can anyone suggest some viable alternatives in Mexico?
It's much better value for money than anywhere in the US.
Those guys were pretty smart
I got my first taste of this with this was a summer school at Les Houches in the French Alps [0], and after graduating I did postdoc positions on three different continents -- all the time appreciating that unlike corporate expats, I got to choose the exact place to go next. Would highly recommend this way of traveling over backpacking.
[0] https://www.houches-school-physics.com/ecole-de-physique-des...
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As an example, this article from 2025 about a family of foreigners being shot dead also lists numerous other recent examples of tourists being killed, and links to those stories:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/01/world/americas/americans-...
Those aren’t even the only ones, and physical harm isn’t the only type of crime foreigners can experience in Mexico either. Moving a conference there for safety makes no sense whatsoever.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_homicide_rat...
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> Beyond problems at the border, the current Secretary for Health and Human Services - Robert F. Kennedy Jr. - has said that he will send those with ADHD to camps. Source: Futurism.
What he actually said:
> "I’m going to dedicate that revenue to creating wellness farms — drug rehabilitation farms, in rural areas all over this country," he said during the podcast. "I’m going to make it so people can go, if you’re convicted of a drug offense, or if you have a drug problem, you can go to one of these places for free."
That what happens when you rely on Futurism as a source.
But he was definitely talking about ADHD. This tweet has the short video of him actually including adderal.
https://x.com/MotherJones/status/1816180369110270435
> I’m going to create these wellness farms where they can go to get off of illegal drugs, off of opiates, but also illegal drugs, other psychiatric drugs, if they want to, to get off of SSRIs, to get off of benzos, to get off of Adderall, and to spend time as much time as they need — three or four years if they need it — to learn to get reparented, to reconnect with communities,
I am not going to skim through 1.5h of deranged ramblings in a raspy voice to find him saying this though.
Are you trying to claim that because he didn't specifically mention ADHD, despite mentioning the drug used to treat ADHD, that he's not talking about ADHD despite him holding views about neurodiversity that are at odds with the published literature on their treatment?
In fact, people without ADHD are much more in need of an intervention if they are abusing adderall than someone who has ADHD, wouldn't you say? So the much more reasonable interpretation is that he is talking about those people, not people with ADHD.
No it's not the only way, because he's also talking about SSRIs, which have only medical uses (no abuse potential really). Therefore it is reasonable to argue he is also talking about Adderall's intended medical use against ADHD rather than its abuse.
Yes he said SSRIs, but SSRIs are not for ADHD, so that has no bearing on whether or not he said "people with ADHD should be sent to camps", which he just... did not say.
This shouldn't need to be stated, but I personally think RFK Jr. is a nutter. That doesn't mean you can stick words in his mouth or imply things he didn't actually say.
Be better than the other side.
Maybe, had he not said that bit as well, I'd agree with you. He could be talking about Adderall purely in a sense of misuse.
But he included psychiatric drugs, and that (and the SSRIs) makes his statement ambiguous enough that I'm comfortable interpreting it as including ADHD patients.
(And, just purely for vilifying psychiatric drugs, the threshold for intolerance [which must not be tolerated in order to achieve a tolerant society] is crossed. Lots of people have mental health issues and need treatment, including with drugs.)
It's to provide people a path for getting off of all manner of drugs that are difficult to get off of. That could be heroin, or it could be Ritalin or some SSRI. It's basically socialized rehab based on some model that RFK seems to favor.
From what I've read (and seen in friends and family), the system is really good at getting people on pharmaceuticals. It doesn't seem to give much of a shit about helping them get off when they choose to do so.
I'm not sure why, but there seems to be a focus on misuse or abuse. Someone could have used the drugs exactly as directed and now doesn't want to use them anymore, and is running into an inability to do so on their own.
No, you're being intentionally disingenuous here. Obviously, he dislikes the fact that these drugs are being prescribed to patients, and he would prefer it if they were not. I'm sure he imagines that these "farms" would be a better treatment for depression than SSRIs are, and likewise for the other drugs and conditions.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/16/magazine/generation-adder...
What if I took them somewhere remote where there are no drugs and didn't let them leave?
My heart hurts for them, but I have no idea if it's a good idea or not.
Regardless, I think his heart is in the right place. Time will tell whether or not it's actually useful.
But they don't, they outsource the job to a group of (mostly) sadistic, uneducated-in-rehab, "boot camps" that somehow think that violently invading an individual's rights and actions is how to "cure" drug addiction, without attempting to treat the underlying causes of addictive behavior.
The problem isn’t the camps but the people who have the authority in them and how the treat people especially if the cure isn’t working.
Not everything can be cured by organic food, fresh air and labor.
BTW is the food the grow for the farms only or is selling it part of the plan?
If the latter then it’s about cheap labor
That is to say, to any sane modern human, curing gayness is nothing like curing drug addiction.
We have to do something. Because whatever we've been doing for the past two decades has amounted to nothing.
And maybe that ends up being the answer, that there is nothing you can do. But I'll never insult someone for trying, no matter the method.
>But I'll never insult someone for trying, no matter the method.
No matter the method is a bad take, that’s how we got gruesome people doing gruesome experiments on people who need treatment.
And the camp thing is pretty old and they always end the same: abuse of power.
Perhaps, but I have family going through this and it just makes you so mad. I'd pay to send him to a camp where he's beat with a bullwhip every day if I knew it could cure him.
Perhaps it clouds my judgment a bit, but the alternative is just watching him die, which I'm not stoked about.
Would you do the same if the chance of curing or killing him is 50:50?
Or if it’s uncertain that it works at all?
I've been in max security prisons. There are generally far more drugs inside these than I've ever seen in the outside world.
I don't want to piss on rehab too much, it can work. But for every decent rehab facility there are probably 100 bogus ones.
Also remember, that to an addict who has been to prison, rehab feels like prison. It has the same locked-down, heavy-on-the-rules design that can cause serious PTSD issues for (practically everyone) who suffers some sort of trauma from being incarcerated.
2) its entirely voluntary and non-coerced
If we assume a drug abuser is doomed for death in the next 6 months. But by using them as slave labor in terrible conditions for 3 years guarantees they will live to old age, regardless of any psychological trauma from said experience, is it worth it?
I'm not taking a position, I'm just making a thought experiment. It's more of a moral philosophical thing than an answer, I guess.
I think a lot of people not in the midwest may not understand the gravity of the fentanyl problem in the US. Literally every family is affected, whether directly or indirectly.
It's basically a religious war. One side seems to think they need to "break people's spirit" by "work camps", the other side seems to believe in "healing from violence" by compassion. You're free to pick your side, but it's going to get harder to switch, and the other side will treat you as their enemy.
The answer is a very obvious "no" in any society that claims to be free.
> I'm not taking a position
Frankly it's terrifying that these sorts of questions are being posed as real dilemmas in western societies in 2025.
This is not only immoral and vile, but borders on the psychopathic. The man should have never been allowed to make any decision affecting public health.
RFK might be an idiot, but even idiots might be right once in a while
Or the fact that you're not longer in the environment with its stressors that cause you to seek out drugs in the first place? Lots of people sleeping rough go for drugs of any kind just to be able to put their mind to rest.
Finland shows this with its "housing first" policy, giving people a home is a relatively easy way to get them off of drugs.
The current administration is setting up a modern day Spiegelgrund.
"Work will set you free from your addiction."
this understanding of metaphors is not that it was used then. the understanding happens today a contemporary application of historical knowledge.
and honestly, it's obvious.
https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/lying-about-ausc...
I've visited two concentration camp memorials, with their cynical writing at the gate.
I've read the Auschwitz documents edited by 2001 Verlag. I've watched the Holocaust movie series of the 1970s (way to early)
nonetheless, I was not aware of concentration camps being labeled as recreational leisure camps of some sort by the nazis.
my point being: it was no lack of education to not know that additional aspect of systematic brain sick evil.
The closest thing I can find is here: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/deceiving-...
And this film was never even shown broadly as it was made near the end of the war. Also, it's technically for a ghetto and not a concentration camp.
No AI I've asked and no links I've found suggest that concentration camps were broadly propagandized as anything similar to "wellness farms".
> Some 18,000 Germans from all walks of life are being held in the political concentration camps in various parts of the country.
> Wilhelm Frick, Prussian minister of the interior, explains that they will be kept there until they become "fit citizens," reconciled if not converted, to the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler.
> Sanitary conditions generally are described as excellent. There are doctors at each camp to care for the health of the inmates, and some of them report that the political prisoners are adepts [sic] at getting on morning "sick call."
> The physical culture includes morning setting-up exercises, football matches and similar group games. The manual labor is mostly tidying up the camp premises and barracks, but there are odd Jobs too, such as sewing or painting swastika emblems on confiscated Communist flags.
> Taeglische Rundschau sees political ideas of tomorrow coming from the concentration camps of today. Quoting a prisoner as saying "Sure we'd like to get out; but this is a good enough place to think things over," the paper comments:
[0] https://newspapers.ushmm.org/historical-article/1933-camps-u...
> At most of the camps privileges are few. Major Kauffman, head of the big Heuberg camp in Wuerttemberg, said his prisoners were allowed to write one letter a month. There are no visiting days there.
It literally even calls them political concentration camps in the article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksverhetzung
this legislation is a consequence of the paradox of tolerance.
Which if you had clicked and read you would see comes from the US Holocaust museum and is heavily focused on Theresienstadt. I was making a point that you're not really interested in engaging with anything I'm writing and are instead focused on just getting your own point across as evidenced by your use of "Theresienstadt" as a point in reply.
the 2010 "source" further above is abysmal Holocaust denial.
your source (ushmm) of course is not.
I got confused on the small smart phone display about who I was responding to.
apologies again.
Do you recall Karl is sent to Theresienstadt where the art studio secretly paints the holocaust?
That is the "paradise ghetto", the potemkin village concentration camp the Nazis created to give tours to international observers to fool them about conditions. Sometimes called a retirement village or the gift of the Fuhrer to the Jewish people but of course, just a temporary pause for transports going further east to the death camps.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theresienstadt_Ghetto
I also found the Reichsparteitagsgelände (Nazi Party Rally Grounds) permanent exhibition the most useful content I was exposed to: they really show how fake news on all available channels and mega-church style mass entertainment were key to overturn a democracy and enable the atrocities. that and first bullying and then eradication of opposition.
I'd really hope US up their resistance and democracy protection game at this point in time. I'm afraid. As in existential fear.
edit: ...also I didn't know it was even used this way, back then, see my TIL reply in some "cousin" comment.
But if you still mean that the specific term "wellness farm" COULD have been used as a euphemism for concentration camps (regardless of whether or not it ever was), then what's the point? Like people also COULD have used the term "suburb" as euphemism for a concentration camp. Should we also be skeptical of anyone who says they want to build suburbs? What's even the point of of saying that a term COULD have been used as euphemism historically?
If it was a well accepted term it’d be one thing, but when made up on the spot it very much sounds like “place we sen out undesirables” to me.
However, you put it in context with the fact that this administration has shipped off people to an El Salvadoran prison without any due process… this becomes a lot more ominous.
In other words, his opinion isn't worth the electronic bits needed to spread them.
Given the things he said about vaccines and bird flu, I wouldn’t trust him an inch.
I had a friend deported from Denmark when he overstayed his visa and it was basically the same thing.
Some of these look really bad and could be sensible justification for the proposed boycott/cancellation (see French scientist eg) but a lot of it looks completely hysterical.
Some bad history with executive orders / The Alien Enemies Act and interning people in the US:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_German_Americans
Also, the current administration stated an intent to relocate (intern / reeducate?) the homeless, many of whom are citizens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenda_47#Social_issues
Because two weeks in jail what could be a simple flight home sounds fishy.
And I wouldn’t want to gamble if I‘m one of the unlucky ones that you described as looking bad.
That kind of uncertainty is exactly what makes those travels unnecessarily dangerous.
That’s not hysterical it‘s cautious.
> Because two weeks in jail what could be a simple flight home sounds fishy.
The inefficiency of American institutions is nearly limitless. Don’t put too much stock in the glacial pace of our bureaucracy as being malicious when it happens everywhere else out of broad incompetence.
> That’s not hysterical it‘s cautious.
Again, I agree that there are a few stories of deportations that are legitimate causes for concern about hosting a conference with internationals in the US. But if you use people getting deported for overstaying their visas as a part of justifying that concern, then that is hysterical. It conflates issues that are effectively totally unrelated to one another.
It would be like claiming it’s not safe to travel to Italy because the local justice systems will charge you with trumped up charges and quote both the Amanda Knox case as well as cases where Americans actually broke the law and got charged justly. Only the Amanda Knox case is actual justification for the claim!
Correct me if I'm misreading this, but it sounds like you're saying that inefficiencies due to incompetence are exempt from criticism.
It should go without saying that detaining innocent people is BAD, regardless of whether it's malice or incompetence.
And to be clear, they aren’t innocent in the referenced example. They were breaking the terms of their visa.
The purpose of a system is what it does.
Remember this the next time you ship a bug! You built a system whose purpose was to have that bug in it.
The purpose of Linux is to ship bugs: https://www.cvedetails.com/product/47/Linux-Linux-Kernel.htm...
Genius stuff here. Crazy how many people use an operating system whose literal purpose according to you is to ship bugs.
https://www.cntraveller.in/story/these-3-countries-rejected-...
More importantly, and according to your link, only Estonia rejected 50+% Indian applications, everyone else rejected less than 50%, with only 2 others anywhere near 50% (Malta and Slovenia).
So out of 29 countries in the Schengen area only 3 were anywhere near the 50% mark and all 3 are tiny countries as far as both area and populations are concerned (those 3 combined account for only 4 million people in total).
Also, just to take one of those 3, Estonia has an overall high rejection rate in comparison to all the others, and that started happening after the pandemic.
Details are important
Schengen isn't "different from EU". It originally was separate from EU, but since 1999 has been an aspect of the EU. Per Wikipedia:
> Originally, the Schengen treaties and the rules adopted under them operated independently from the European Union. However, in 1999 they were incorporated into European Union law by the Amsterdam Treaty, while providing opt-outs for the only two EU member states that had remained outside the Area: Ireland and the United Kingdom (which subsequently withdrew from the EU in 2020). Schengen is now a core part of EU law, and all EU member states without an opt-out which have not already joined the Schengen Area are legally obliged to do so when technical requirements have been met. Several non-EU countries are included in the area through special association agreements.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schengen_Agreement
"Several non-EU countries are included in the area through special association agreements."
In fact there are also EU countries NOT in Schengen. And there are countries in Europe but not in the EU which are not in Schengen either.
Obtaining a work visa in a particular country is not a human right, and their issuance are up to the hosting country’s policies.
I would guess that 90% of the applications were for travel, not work.
> their issuance are up to the hosting country’s policies
These countries don't even bother to apply their policies. Some cases I heard about indicate that they randomly reject applications, without reviewing them.
As to whether they are conforming tot heir own policies or not, I can’t find any evidence either way in the linked article. They’re just stating the numbers.
Sounds like Estonia, Malta, and Slovenia didn't want their countries to become transits for illegal immigration from India to the UK.
Countries like Germany get legitimate Indian immigration for work and higher education so their rejection rate is lower.
Trans people might not enjoy Slovakia or Hungary right now, but I’m not sure they are unsafe to visit for them (yet)? Someone local might fill me in here…
https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/03/20/hungary-bans-lgbt-pride-...
The US doesn't have a monopoly on immigration horror stories: Australian immigration illegally detained an Australian citizen for 10 months. [0] They illegally deported another Australian citizen to the Philippines, and when they discovered their mistake, their initial response was to cover it up rather than try to rectify it. [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornelia_Rau
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivian_Solon
I would evade Germany, Austria and also Italy in general, due to common racism against slavic people.
I could have said Switzerland, but I believe that my point expands to the entirety of the EU, why I expanded a bit.
As some of you sibling commenters also write: Not all parts of the Schengen / EU is equally - just like you probably wouldn't move these things to rural Alaska.
Sure, Singapore has draconian laws when it comes to narcotics. But surely everyone attending will be aware of this? It’s been widely reported over the decades how foreign nationals have gotten life sentences or even the death penalty for drug running. What I’m saying is that Singapore are up front about it and it’s not enforced arbitrarily. Leaving your personal stash at home and abstaining for a few days should hopefully not be too difficult for the attendant engineers.
Wait, holy shit, it was legalized in 2022. Didn't know. Nice!
I frequently get the impression that the policymakers in Singapore are more progressive than they reveal, but are extremely cautious about loosening up because they don't want to antagonise certain voter groups (e.g. people of certain religious persuasions). It is quite telling that the law was repealed in its entirety only in 2023, one year before the former Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong stepped down from his position.
So, enforcement was certainly attempted and people were certainly detained for periods of time and forced to defend against charges that were laid.
It's not readily clear how often charges under Section 377 (1860-) or Section 377A (1938-) were laid in Singapore prior to 2007 (or of the charges laid how many cases came to trial and how many convictions occurred).
~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_377A_(Singapore)#Const...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/oct/05/us-scientist...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14643467
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24369233
Clarification: the “not new” part is foreign attendees not being able to attend conferences in the U.S. So, if you valued inclusion, holding international conferences in the U.S. has been a bad idea for a long time.
> I was then placed in a real jail unit: two levels of cells surrounding a common area, just like in the movies. I was put in a tiny cell alone with a bunk bed and a toilet.
> The best part: there were blankets. After three days without one, I wrapped myself in mine and finally felt some comfort.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/19/canadian-det...
How is this not "new at all"? I just don't understand why some people are so blind to the ongoing abuse of power. What a shame!
They're not blind to it. They either like it and want it (sometimes because they benefit from it), or they're indifferent to it because it doesn't affect them personally. I know — it's really hard to appreciate the mindset of people with no empathy.
And I was very clear about which part is “not new”. What a shame people can’t read. What a shame partisan commenters read “U.S. has been blah blah for a long time” and immediately jump to “Trump defender!!!”
Edit: I should also mention I literally emailed dang to get https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43410548 (discussion thread for your link) restored when it was flagged.
What has always been going on: people overstay their visa, depending on the scale and country, people get treated badly almost always in these cases.
What is happening now: people being critical of Trump are being rejected, legal visa holders are being detained because of the scale of the abuse.
These are clearly very different things and very much a fault of specifically Trump administration. Searching phones and messages to look for Trump critical messages .. unbelievable and totally new stuff is going on here: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/19/trump-musk-f...
I disagree. These legal visa holders are caught for small (or slightly larger) infractions, like a previous visa revocation due to running a cannabis business, sort of working (helping?) on a non-work visa, obviously planning to work on a non-work visa, etc. These could always (at least after 911?) land you in big trouble in the U.S. if you have the wrong nationality and/or skin color. I believe these were almost completely ignored by (mainstream) press because most Americans won't sympathize with them, they are obviously illegals, criminals, terrorists, etc. Now that Canadians/Western Europeans are caught in the system, suddenly people with the same infractions or suspected infractions are obviously legal visa holders.
I personally know someone with the wrong nationality and wrong color who was detained at the border (maybe not technically "detained"? let's say held) for no apparent reason for hours and got their devices searched, then released and allowed to enter. That was either 2013 or 2014. Thankfully not weeks or months.
The only fundamental change now is the bar is lowered and sympathizable (to most Westerners) people are being caught in it.
And I maintain that people who actually valued inclusion shouldn't have held conferences in the U.S. since a long time ago, if ever.
I agree with your "this didn't start yesterday" view and with the "holding US conferences was always less than maximally inclusive" (for example because it was fucking expensive to go to Las Vegas, and because the phone searches, and ... in general the whole border patrol can do anything for miles around ports of entry)
But many things can be true at the same time. Trump found his paramilitary troops, the scale of the operation(s) and the source of the cruelty being the White House seems new. (At least since Nixon/Contra.)
The agencies don’t reveal reasons why someone was denied or detained, so there is no evidence whatsoever that someone was detained for being critical of Trump. The claim that this happened is from Philippe Baptiste, a French minister for higher education who has been attacking America continuously in a bid to attract researchers from the US.
What are they waiting for? To see if they will come out ahead. It's classic rebel's dilemma.
Eventually the truth will catch up to us all. We'll undeniably realize this is a tyrannical movement that intends to replace the Constitutional order without the consent of the governed.
In no universe is the election of a dictator equivalent to 3/4 of the state legislatures ratifying an amendment to the Constitution.
However, these cases were rejections of visa. And even Stenberg's case was about being denied entry, not arbitrary detainment and torture like we see now. IMHO this wave of cases is a change in quantity that results in a change of quality already. But the quality of the rejection/detainment has changed as well.
The second and third are the same incident, from the prior Trump administration. But the visa was denied; nobody was arrested or detained.
The fact is if you care about people from all around the world being able to attend your conference, the U.S. hasn’t been a good location for a long time. That’s not new. In fact [2][3] is only noteworthy because it was an influential individual (in this circle) with a strong passport; people with weaker passports are routinely denied. Hell sometimes UN diplomats are denied.
Right, but you did not give examples of that happening previously.
> The fact is if you care about people from all around the world being able to attend your conference, the U.S. hasn’t been a good location for a long time.
TFA says
> As an Internet community we strive to include everyone. Holding a meeting in the US is incompatible with our values.
It’s been incompatible with their values for very long.
I don't think this has been a basis for denying entry to people in past?
People do take you more seriously if you've been around for a while and they know you aren't full of shit, but that's just social dynamics.
Personally I think the hyperbole only serves to cheapen the real problems.
Historians are actively comparing us to Nazi Germany. https://snyder.substack.com/p/what-to-expect-when-youre-expe...
The holocaust started as a deportation effort. Trump reportedly said "I wish I had Hitler's generals." https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-said-hitler-did-...
3-4 prominent republicans have Sieg Heiled in public, including Bannon who did not put his hand on his heart first.
You are confusing hyperbole for actually shocking news, and it's so shocking it's easily mistaken for hyperbole because if you don't bury your head in the ground it's too much to bear. Accepting the truth of whats happening means you must act, and so people are opting not to accept it to protect their mental health.
https://www.npr.org/2025/01/29/nx-s1-5276898/rfk-drugs-addic...
"I'm going to bring a new industry to [rural] America, where addicts can help each other recover from their addictions," Kennedy promised, during a film on addiction released by his presidential campaign. "We're going to build hundreds of healing farms where American kids can reconnect with America's soil."
That's the kernel of truth, but when you bring in the historical context of authoritarian regimes, and the absolute lack of rule of law, you start to get very very afraid.
In 2025 Americans are so anesthetized even the "opposition party" can't say the obvious out loud in public. Let alone the president's cabinet.
People voting for a dictator isn't equivalent to 3/4 of the legislatures ratifying an amendment to the Constitution. The People have not given consent to set aside the Constitutional order.
If the People want to set aside the Constitution, they must do the hard work of convincing enough people in enough states to do it lawfully. Otherwise it's settled with might makes right.
For all the flaws of the founding fathers they definitely understood power. How it gets consolidated. And how to fragment it. Their advice is polyarchy.
What we're witnessing is autogolpe to establish a CEO-dictator, the consolidation of power. In no universe are Trump, Vance, Musk, Thiel, Yarvin on the right side of history. And they will fail.
No, they don't.
They just need to obey a government that ignores its Constitutional bounda.
> Otherwise it's settled with might makes right.
It's always settled that way. Legality isn't a substitute for might makes right, it is, a social mechanism for guiding where the “might” ends up. But if the people—who ultimately, are the muscles of the might—decide not to care about legality, than it doesn't matter any more. Words written on paper are not self enforcing.
No, the constitution has a maintenance cost. The constitution is already set aside if people are not willing to pay that maintenance cost. Solidarity is the price of freedom.
Despotism is the default state you will get when you don't pay upkeep to your institutions.
Inaction is largely indistinguishable from consent.
> autogolpe
No. We are experience Russian backed regime change in the same way we have instituted regime change in other countries, amplified by tried and true propaganda techniques used to propel other authoritarian regimes to power.
> CEO-dictator
This is a deliberate new age propaganda technique using conceptual metaphors (see George Lakoff).
"The CEO metaphor re-frames political rule as a business operation, which makes executive overreach appear logical rather than dangerous."
By getting someone to accept the metaphor of CEO, it manifests consent for executive overreach without having directly assessed how accurate "president as CEO" is as a metaphor.
> In no universe are Trump, Vance, Musk, Thiel, Yarvin on the right side of history.
Complete darwinism/social darwinism is a cogent and consistent moral system. It doesn't produce a world anyone should want to live in, but it is a consistent ideology. Social darwinism was the philosophical core of nazi ideology. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/09/24/hitlers-world/
Im a bit disappointed in HN for ranking it so high. Time to take a look at the bot detection algo?
I'm sure there's a left-leaning tech group you can join where everyone agrees with you. But this post doesn't belong here, and neither do flame wars.
I use https://hckrnews.com it shows flagged posts too.
I can’t get used to the fact that the US seems dead set on destroying its reputation in the world.
But with the direction the comment section of HN has taken over the last few years I’m sure there will be lots of commenters who will dismiss this as virtue signaling.
The targets usually have darker skin or are from countries far more east, but now it affects people like themselves.
Fence-sitting these days is a political decision all by itself. Well, it always was, but now that we've established a new normal (that's not very normal) rooting for the status quo is even more partisan.
It's not too much of a problem now, as t Big Tech is not in the "software business" so much as in the "laying off people to make the stock look good" ; but at some point they'll have to bring people in to actually write code.
Or, are they expexting LLMs to really make the bulk of the jobs?
Or maybe everything settles down in two years, and this is just a bout of neo-McCarthyism.
Time will tell. In the meantime, I guess Europe must not be that bad, if people are organizing conferences here instead of China or Dubai ?
I told the last recruiter flat out that it's no longer ethical for me to work for a US company but I don't think many people will do the same.
Maybe teaching about the holocaust should be accompanied with copies of daily newspapers from the late 1930s to demonstrate their mundanity.
Any reputable news sources for this?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/19/canadian-det...
- psychological manipulation through prolonged uncertainty and withholding information
- dehumanizing conditions like freezing cells with inadequate blankets
- sleep deprivation
- physical suffering during a 24-hour transfer between facilities while shackled and confined in a prison bus
- humiliation and degradation particularly during pregnancy testing procedures where she was forced to squat over a communal toilet with others present
- arbitrary detention without any timeframe without clear legal justification despite having an approved visa and no criminal record
https://www.nhpr.org/nh-news/2025-03-14/green-card-holder-fr...
Mind you this is an individual with a legal visa, German citizen, and in theory the type of immigrant "good" for the US.
This raised all red flags to anyone even with legal status to go to the US.
(Apart from the GDS Transport font, which is exclusive to GOV.UK websites)
That said, I do find the US border incidents to be super scary. I don't blame people for not wanting to come.
[1] https://www.ietf.org/administration/policies-procedures/code...
And let's be honest, a lot of people do indeed feel that this will only happen to people who make mistakes in their visa application (knowingly or not), have tattoos (or travel with tattooing gear), participate in any form of activism, are transgender or otherwise queer, or any other reason not applicable to conservative/right-leaning, white, middle class or higher, educated white collar workers. Some people are quite comfortable with all this (I won't bother pointing out the historical parallels), and it does come down to privilege and having an approved political mindset.
And here's the really nasty thing: if you point this out, you run the risk of sounding exactly like the 'woke' bogeymen this administration is 'fighting'. Language and the imagery invoked have been hijacked to a fascinating but troubling degree.
This is called denial or shock, which is a natural result of grief.
Is there any evidence of this?
> She said Schmidt told her immigration agents pressured him to give up his green card. She said he was placed on a mat in a bright room with other people at the airport, with little food or water, suffered sleep deprivation, and was denied access to his medication for anxiety and depression.
> “He hardly got anything to drink. And then he wasn’t feeling very well and he collapsed,” said Senior.
> He was transported by ambulance to Mass General Hospital. He didn’t know it at the time, but he also had influenza.
0. https://www.wgbh.org/news/local/2025-03-14/green-card-holder...
Everything felt like it was meant to break you. Nothing was explained to us. I wasn’t given a phone call. We were locked in a room, no daylight, with no idea when we would get out.
I tried suing over those, but even though there is a statute saying they must be bath towels, laws in the USA don't necessarily have to be followed. There are two types of laws, mandatory and directory. Directory laws are laws that are just "if you wanna" and don't carry any weight. A large majority of laws governing prisoner rights are these type of laws and there is no enforcement mechanism when they are broken. [ironically these laws specifically use the word "shall" in their wording, but in most jurisdictions "shall" is legally read as "may" in the USA]
"The towel shall be made of cloth and be bath size."
the State Department has also announced that it considers sex markers that don't correspond to sex at birth to be fraudulent. ostensibly for the sports ban, but it actually applies to all visa applications and documentation.
combine those two facts with the administration's stated antipathy towards us, and the recent trend of Germans and Canadians being detained for weeks with no apparent cause, and I think you should see why trans women ought to avoid US travel right now.
I hate this culture war micromanagment where politicians write moral laws for things where there should not be any law.
https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2025/03/cops-burst-into-womens-r...