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71
The Superdeep Borehole / Re: The Japan Thread
« Last post by Polident Hive on March 19, 2025, 02:37:47 AM »
My language ability is shite. Japanese, too. But even showing the minimum amount of effort to abide by customs, or basic manners, goes a long way. A lot of the tourists, I assume, don’t act this way in their own countries. “Vacation mode” or whatever isn’t an invitation to act sociopathic.
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The Superdeep Borehole / Re: The Japan Thread
« Last post by chronovore on March 18, 2025, 08:21:23 PM »
Gotta add: tourism is damaging Japanese culture's famous manners. All the loud, self-centered, ignorant tourists coming through, dragging their check-in baggage through narrow shop aisles, expecting that they can get vegan options at the ramen or sushi joint, it's all worn out the kindness of locals. Japanese people generally do not differentiate between foreigners who are visiting and residents… though speaking reasonable Japanese seems to frequently take the tension out of a conversation.
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The Superdeep Borehole / Re: The Japan Thread
« Last post by chronovore on March 18, 2025, 08:18:03 PM »
Yes, locals are getting priced out of places to stay because tourism is booming so hard. It'd be nice if it was like Hawai'i where locals gave each other a "discount" but hotels gotta make hay while the sun shines.
74
The Superdeep Borehole / Re: USA Politics Thread
« Last post by Occam on March 16, 2025, 01:16:54 AM »
How a Columbia Student Fled to Canada After ICE Came Looking for Her

spoiler (click to show/hide)
Ranjani Srinivasan’s student visa was revoked by U.S. immigration authorities. That was just the start of her odyssey.
The first knock at the door came eight days ago, on a Friday morning.

Three federal immigration agents showed up at a Columbia University apartment searching for Ranjani Srinivasan, who had recently learned her student visa had been revoked. Ms. Srinivasan, an international student from India, did not open the door.

She was not home when the agents showed up again the next night, just hours before a former Columbia student living in campus housing, Mahmoud Khalil, was detained, roiling the university. Ms. Srinivasan packed a few belongings, left her cat behind with a friend and jumped on a flight to Canada at LaGuardia Airport.

When the agents returned a third time, this past Thursday night, and entered her apartment with a judicial warrant, she was gone.

“The atmosphere seemed so volatile and dangerous,” Ms. Srinivasan, 37, said on Friday in an interview with The New York Times, her first public remarks since leaving. “So I just made a quick decision.”

Ms. Srinivasan, a Fulbright recipient who was pursuing a doctoral degree in urban planning, was caught in the dragnet of President Trump’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian demonstrators through the use of federal immigration powers. She is one of a handful of noncitizens that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has targeted at Columbia in recent days.

In the week since that first knock at the door, Ms. Srinivasan says she has struggled to understand why the State Department abruptly revoked her student visa without explanation, leading Columbia to withdraw her enrollment from the university because her legal status had been terminated.

On Friday, while considering her future in Canada, she received some answers.

The Department of Homeland Security issued a statement that characterized Ms. Srinivasan as a terrorist sympathizer and accused her of advocating violence and being “involved in activities supporting Hamas, a terrorist organization.” The department did not provide any evidence for its allegations.

Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, posted surveillance footage on social media that showed Ms. Srinivasan lugging a suitcase at LaGuardia as she fled to Canada. Secretary Noem celebrated Ms. Srinivasan’s departure as a “self-deportation.”

“It is a privilege to be granted a visa to live & study in the United States of America,” Secretary Noem wrote on X. “When you advocate for violence and terrorism that privilege should be revoked and you should not be in this country.”

Ms. Srinivasan’s lawyers have vehemently denied those allegations and have accused the Trump administration of revoking her visa for engaging in “protected political speech,” saying she was denied “any meaningful form of due process” to challenge the visa revocation.

“Secretary Noem’s tweet is not only factually wrong but fundamentally un-American,” Naz Ahmad, one of Ms. Srinivasan’s lawyers, said in a statement, adding: “For at least a week, D.H.S. has made clear its intent to punish her for her speech, and they have failed in their efforts.”

In response to questions, officials with the Homeland Security Department said that when Ms. Srinivasan renewed her visa last year, she failed to disclose two court summonses related to protests on Columbia’s campus. The department did not say how the summonses made her a terrorist sympathizer.

“I’m fearful that even the most low-level political speech or just doing what we all do — like shout into the abyss that is social media — can turn into this dystopian nightmare where somebody is calling you a terrorist sympathizer and making you, literally, fear for your life and your safety,” Ms. Srinivasan said in the interview on Friday.
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Ms. Srinivasan’s current situation can be traced back to last year, when she was arrested at an entrance to Columbia’s campus the same day that pro-Palestinian protesters occupied Hamilton Hall, a university building. She said she had not been a part of the break-in but was returning to her apartment that evening after a picnic with friends, wading through a churning crowd of protesters and barricades on West 116th Street, when the police pushed her and arrested her.

She was briefly detained and received two summonses, one for obstructing vehicular or pedestrian traffic and another for refusing to disperse. Her case was quickly dismissed and did not result in a criminal record, according to her lawyers and court documents. Ms. Srinivasan said that she never faced disciplinary action from the university and was in good academic standing.

“She was taken in with roughly 100 other people after being blocked from returning to her apartment and getting stuck in the street,” said Nathan Yaffe, one of her lawyers. “The court recognized this when it dismissed her case as having no merit. Ranjani was just trying to walk home.”

Ms. Srinivasan said she did not disclose the summonses in the visa renewal form later in the year because her case had been dismissed in May and she did not have a conviction.

“Because I had not and the charges were dismissed, I sort of marked it as ‘no,’” she said. “But maybe that was my mistake. I would have been happy to disclose that, but just the way they had questioned us was sort of assuming that you had a conviction.”

The State Department has broad discretion to revoke student visas, which it typically does if someone overstays or the government discovers fraud; convictions and arrests can also lead to revocations. Immigration lawyers said it was highly unusual for ICE to descend on college campuses searching for students with recently revoked visas as the agency has the past few days at Columbia, rattling many students.

“It is more rare for the government to act the way it has, such as in the cases in Columbia University, where they’re going on campus and conducting an operation to apprehend somebody,” said Greg Chen, a lawyer at the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

The Trump administration’s targeting of students with visas at a university enveloped in a cultural firestorm opened a new front in the president’s attempts to ramp up deportations and tamp down pro-Palestinian views. The president canceled $400 million in grants to the university after accusing it of failing to protect Jewish students. The arrests and attempted detentions of the Columbia students has led to an uproar among Democrats and civil rights groups.

Jason Houser, a senior ICE official during the Biden administration, said that “criminalizing free speech through radicalized immigration enforcement is a direct attack on our democracy.”

Last week, ICE arrested Mr. Khalil, a green card holder who had become a leading face of the pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia. Mr. Trump hailed the arrest as “the first of many to come.” On Friday, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it had arrested Leqaa Kordia, who had been involved in the protests at Columbia. Federal officials said she had overstayed her visa and had previously been arrested at a Columbia protest in April.

Unlike Mr. Khalil, Ms. Srinivasan said she was not an activist or a member of any group that organized demonstrations on campus.

Ms. Srinivasan said she was an architect who came to the United States from India as part of the Fulbright program in 2016 and that she enrolled at Columbia in 2020. She said she was in the fifth year of an urban planning doctoral program at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, and was supposed to graduate in May.

She said that her activity on social media had been mostly limited to liking or sharing posts that highlighted “human rights violations” in the war in Gaza. And she said that she had signed several open letters related to the war, including one by architecture scholars that called for “Palestinian liberation.”

“I’m just surprised that I’m a person of interest,” she said. “I’m kind of a rando, like, absolute rando,” she said, using slang for random.

It was March 5 when she received an email from the U.S. Consulate in Chennai, India, indicating that her visa had been revoked. The notice did not provide a reason, saying only that “information has come to light” that may make her ineligible for a visa.

Confused, she emailed Columbia’s office for international students the following day seeking guidance. An official informed her that the revocation would take effect only if she left the country and that she could remain in the United States to pursue her studies for the time being, according to emails reviewed by The Times.

The next morning, on March 7, Ms. Srinivasan was on a call with an official from the international student office when the federal agents first knocked on the door of her apartment, which is off campus but operated by Columbia. The official told Ms. Srinivasan to call campus security, while her roommate engaged with the agents from behind the closed apartment door.

In an interview, her roommate said that the agents had initially identified themselves as “police,” declined to provide their badge numbers, saying they feared they would be doxxed, and stood to the side of the door so that they were not visible through the peep hole. The roommate, a fellow Columbia student who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear for her safety, said that the building’s doorman, who is an immigrant, later told her that he had let the three agents into the building because he was frightened.

Ms. Srinivasan abandoned the apartment that night, so she was not there when officials returned the following evening. Her roommate once again refused to open the door to let them in and recorded audio of the interaction, which she shared with The Times.

“We were here yesterday,” one of the officials says, believing he was talking to Ms. Srinivasan because the roommate had not identified herself. “We’re here today. We’re here tonight. Tomorrow. You’re probably scared. If you are, I get it. The reality is, your visa was revoked. You are now amenable to removal proceedings.”

The official stressed that he and his colleagues were not trying to break the law, that she would have the right to go before an immigration judge and left a phone number for the Homeland Security Department that she could call if she had “a change of heart.”

“That’s the easiest and fastest way to do this, as opposed to you being in your apartment and us knocking on your door every day, which is just silly,” he said. “You’re a very smart person. It’s just not — it’s not worth it.”

The next day, Ms. Srinivasan received an email from Columbia saying that homeland security had alerted the university that her visa had been revoked and her legal status in the country had been terminated. Because she had to immediately leave the United States, the email said, her enrollment at Columbia had been withdrawn and she had to vacate student housing.

The email, signed by the university’s international student office, said that, in compliance with its legal obligations, Columbia was asking her to meet with the homeland security agents. The university declined to comment on Ms. Srinivasan’s case.

On Thursday night, three federal agents returned to Ms. Srinivasan’s apartment with a search warrant signed by a judge and went inside to search for her, according to her roommate and lawyers.

By then, Ms. Srinivasan was already in Canada.

[close]

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/15/nyregion/columbia-student-kristi-noem-video.html

You should read the entire article.

Fascism sure is awesome. "Laws? Where we are going we don't need laws."
75
Video Game Bored / Re: Random Gaming Talk Thread
« Last post by bork on March 14, 2025, 10:46:28 AM »


Not a handheld, but I got the new Asus Z13 (32 GB) Windows tablet yesterday.  This uses the Halo Strix/AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395.  Performance is about on par with the Nvidia 4070 mobile, but this is with an iGPU!  Pretty insane performance.  It's basically like the Super Asus Ally 2 Turbo XL Edition.  Like with the handheld Windows PCs, you can also allocate how much VRAM you want to use.  I can't say that I saw a difference (if any) with 16GB ram/16gb vram versus 24gb ram/8gb vram with the games I tested, but it's good to have the option for games that benefit from more vram like Indiana Jones.  This thing is the fastest, most efficient, most responsive Windows machine I've ever used.  Game performance varies with some games running better than they do on my 4070 laptop and others requiring me to drop down from 1440P to 1080P, but overall it's ridiculously impressive.  And again, this is on an iGPU!  The screen is a really nice 1600P 500 nits IPS panel.  Speakers are kinda low and tinny, although using the included Dolby Atmos app does help a lot.  The keyboard cover is also all right, although the backlighting is way too dim.  Overall it's a much, much better version of the tablet they released in 2023. 

Barring any hardware or major software issues that pop up, I'll be selling off my laptop and possibly my Legion Go.  This could also replace a tablet outright since the battery life is really good.  On the quiet setting, I've seen tests with continuous Youtube playback at nine hours or more.  But I'm gonna keep my tablet because the Z13 is a larger, heftier 13.4" and that's not going to be as easy to hold and use like my 11" Samsung Tab S9.  Plus the S9 still has a better (OLED) screen and speakers.

76
Video Game Bored / Re: Random Gaming Talk Thread
« Last post by bork on March 12, 2025, 06:37:04 PM »
which handheld is that?

I was thinking of buying a psp but it seems they are pretty pricey

Left- Trimui Brick

Right- Retroid Pocket 5

Just got this guy the other day:

77
The Superdeep Borehole / Re: USA Politics Thread
« Last post by Occam on March 12, 2025, 04:24:23 PM »
Egg Prices Are Still Surging, Hitting Consumers’ Wallets
Prices for the staple rose 10.4% in February even as overall inflation eased a bit.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/12/business/egg-prices-inflation.html

Oh.
78
The Superdeep Borehole / Re: The Japan Thread
« Last post by Polident Hive on March 12, 2025, 01:42:04 AM »
Some friends asked for hotel recommendations in Tokyo and I’m going through ones I’ve previously stayed at. Everything is two to four times pricier. It’s crazy. I’ve heard complaints about people paying with yen getting priced out. I didn’t think it’s this bad.
79
Video Game Bored / Re: Random Gaming Talk Thread
« Last post by MMaRsu on March 11, 2025, 07:31:45 PM »
which handheld is that?

I was thinking of buying a psp but it seems they are pretty pricey
80
The Superdeep Borehole / Re: USA Politics Thread
« Last post by Occam on March 11, 2025, 01:44:35 AM »
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/10/us/trump-rubio-khalil-columbia-student-protests.html

"Trump Administration Seeks to Expel a Green-Card Holder Over Student Protests

Immigration officers arrested a Columbia University graduate for helping lead campus protests against Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. President Trump said the case was “the first arrest of many to come.”"

To further show his love for the first amendment, Trump also cancelled $400 million of grants and contracts with Columbia University.

Full article, which is behind a paywall.
spoiler (click to show/hide)
The Trump administration invoked an obscure legal statute over the weekend in an attempt to deport a recent Columbia University graduate — and lawful permanent resident of the United States — who helped lead campus protests against Israel last year, people with knowledge of the action said on Monday.

Mahmoud Khalil, 30, who graduated in December from Columbia with a master’s degree from its School of International and Public Affairs, was arrested by immigration officers in New York on Saturday and sent to a detention center in Louisiana. Mr. Khalil, who has Palestinian heritage, holds a green card and is married to an American citizen who is eight months pregnant.

On Monday, a federal judge in Manhattan ordered the government not to remove Mr. Khalil from the United States while the judge reviewed a petition challenging the legality of his detention. Mr. Khalil’s lawyers also filed a motion on Monday asking the judge to compel the federal government to transfer him back to New York.

President Trump said Mr. Khalil’s case was “the first arrest of many to come.”

“We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it,” Mr. Trump said on social media on Monday.

“If you support terrorism, including the slaughtering of innocent men, women, and children, your presence is contrary to our national and foreign policy interests, and you are not welcome here. We expect every one of America’s Colleges and Universities to comply,” he added.

The arrest and attempted expulsion of Mr. Khalil by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, has provoked alarm over free-speech rights and the Trump administration’s escalating crackdown on immigration and on universities that Mr. Trump and his aides argue are too liberal.

The administration did not publicly lay out the legal authority for the arrest. But two people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations, said Secretary of State Marco Rubio relied on a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act that gives him sweeping power to expel foreigners.

The provision says any “alien whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States is deportable.”

Mr. Rubio also reposted a Homeland Security Department statement that accused Mr. Khalil of having “led activities aligned to Hamas.” But officials have not accused him of having any contact with the terrorist group, taking direction from it or providing material support to it.

Rather, the rationale is that the anti-Israel protests Mr. Khalil helped lead were antisemitic and fostered a hostile environment for Jewish students at Columbia, the people with knowledge of the matter said. Mr. Rubio’s argument is that the United States has a foreign policy of combating antisemitism around the world and that it would undermine this policy objective to tolerate Mr. Khalil’s continued presence in the United States, they said.

“We haven’t seen anything like this as far as I’ve been a practicing attorney,” said Robyn Barnard, an immigration lawyer at Human Rights First. “It’s just really deeply concerning to see the U.S. government deciding to use their limited resources in terms of enforcement of immigration laws to target someone whose speech they just disagree with, but otherwise doesn’t seem to violate our First Amendment.”

Mr. Trump has taken measures to try to suppress protests and other activities on campuses that officials in his administration consider anti-Israel or antisemitic, often conflating the two. On Friday, the Trump administration announced it was canceling $400 million of grants and contracts with Columbia, citing “the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.”

While a student at Columbia, Mr. Khalil, who was a negotiator and spokesman for the protesters, played a major role in campus protests that broke out after Hamas launched an assault on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing about 1,200 people and kidnapping about 250 others. The Israeli military carried out strikes in Gaza that have killed nearly 50,000 Palestinians, according to health officials there.

Pro-Palestinian protests and a student encampment at Columbia — as well as the university administration’s response, which included asking the police to clear out protesters — became a lightning rod in national debates over public criticism of Israel. Some protesters adopted slogans like “globalize the intifada” and called for freeing Palestine “from the river to the sea,” a phrase that has radically different interpretations by Israelis and Palestinians and that led to accusations of antisemitism.

The State Department declined to comment on Monday. The Homeland Security Department referred questions to the State Department.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Mr. Trump previewed that he intended to expel foreign students who had participated in anti-Israel protests as part of his broader plans for a sweeping crackdown on immigration. He generally framed that plan in terms of canceling student visas, however — not expelling lawful permanent residents.

Mr. Khalil, who was born and raised in Syria, became a lawful permanent resident in 2024 after having entered the United States on a student visa around December 2022 to pursue a master’s at Columbia, his lawyers said.

His lawyers said Mr. Khalil was detained on Saturday night by four people dressed in plain clothes who entered the lobby of his New York apartment building, which is owned by Columbia, and identified themselves as D.H.S. officers looking to arrest him. Ms. Khalil’s wife and his lawyers, whom Mr. Khalil got on the phone, told the officers that Mr. Khalil had a green card, but the agents arrested him anyway, his lawyers said.

A lawful permanent resident, or green-card holder, is protected by the Constitution, which includes First Amendment free-speech rights and Fifth Amendment due-process rights. The Trump administration’s attempt to expel Mr. Khalil under that statutory provision is likely to face a constitutional challenge, several legal experts said.

Amy Belsher, the director of immigrants’ rights litigation at the New York Civil Liberties Union, said she could not recall any previous instances in which a secretary of state had invoked that provision since Congress enacted the Immigration and Nationality Act, or I.N.A., in 1952.

“It’s an escalation,” she said. “This provision has not been historically invoked and is incredibly vague and would raise real concerns about the weaponization of the I.N.A. to remove people who the administration just disagrees with.”

Because any prior use of the provision appears to have been rare at most, legal specialists were still sorting through what it would mean procedurally — including whether an immigration judge would need to formally revoke Mr. Khalil’s green card and issue a final removal order.

It was also not clear whether administrative removal proceedings, should they be a necessary first step, would delay the ability of Mr. Khalil’s lawyers to pursue a constitutional challenge in federal court. Mr. Khalil’s lawyers did not immediately reply to a request for comment on Monday.

Nor was it clear whether any legal challenge to his detention and deportation proceedings would play out in New York, where he was arrested, or in Louisiana. The appeals court that oversees federal judicial proceedings in Louisiana is particularly conservative.

At a rally in Iowa on Oct. 16, 2023, Mr. Trump declared that, “in the wake of the attacks on Israel, Americans have been disgusted to see the open support for terrorists among the legions of foreign nationals on college campuses. They’re teaching your children hate.” He added: “Under the Trump administration, we will revoke the student visas of radical, anti-American and anti-Semitic foreigners at our colleges and universities, and we will send them straight back home.”

At a speech in Las Vegas on Oct. 28, Mr. Trump said that “we’ll terminate the visas of all of those Hamas sympathizers, and we’ll get them off our college campuses, out of our cities and get them the hell out of our country.” And at a Nov. 8 campaign stop in Florida, he said he would “quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism.”

On Monday, Mr. Rubio met in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in part to discuss efforts to end the war in Gaza. As a Republican senator representing Florida, Mr. Rubio was a vocal supporter of Israel in the war, telling one protester confronting him in the Capitol that the “vicious animals” of Hamas were to blame for all the devastation and civilian deaths from Israeli military strikes in Gaza.
[close]

Trump threatens funding cut to colleges allowing 'illegal protests'
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-says-federal-funding-will-stop-colleges-schools-allowing-illegal-protests-2025-03-04/

Goodbye, freedom of speech. But at least eggs are cheap now and the stock market is booming. Right?
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