In 1990 it was only 5% of Americans and now it's 50%. In the UK it's 85% but a better comparison is probably France who are in the Schengen Area so only 60% have a passport.
If I lived in France I doubt I would travel outside of the Schengen Area.
About half of Americans traveling to/from Mexico by land at a small crossing i noticed didn't even have them (recently). Turns out Mexico doesn't legally require a passport for entry and the US has to take back citizens who appear without one. This won't do shit to stop escaping deadbeats, just another scheme to punish parents at a threshold so low it could be a single misreported tech worker payment while doing fuck all for the kids.
And people wonder why no one is having kids. It is punishment after punishment by a society who pretends to care about kids but does fuck all to help, only to rub it in your face and punish you when you are down.
> "All foreigners, regardless of their nationality, are required to present a valid and not expired passport or travel document when entering Mexico (traveling by air, land or sea)."
What you may have observed is Mexican border control at a small crossing may not enforce that requirement.
Article 11 [Mexican Constitution]
Every person has the right to enter and leave the country, to travel through its territory and to move house without the necessity of a letter of safe passage, passport, safe-conduct or any other similar requirement. In the event of criminal or civil liability, the exercise of this right shall be subject to the judicial authority. Relating to limitations imposed by the laws on immigration and public health, or in respect to undesirable aliens residing in the country, the exercise of this right shall be subject to the administrative authority.
Every person has the right to enter the country without a passport. There are ways for the authorities to get around it and fuck with people found in the interior without it (says subject to administrative authority for immigration, but they're explicitly constitutionally barred from requiring anything like a passport) , but ultimately it's unconstitutional to make a law requiring it. This trumps the aspirational hearsay provided by the consulate and explains why none of the consulate advice is able to cite where this supposed "requirement" comes from. The consulate either was mistaken or wrote that because it will really suck to leave the country without it and they don't want to deal with the fallout.
Here are a couple of relevant sections, from pages 16 and 15 of the above document, respectively:
For foreigners to Mexico:
Article 37. To enter the country, foreigners must:
I. Present the following documents at the immigration inspection checkpoint before the Institute:
a) A passport or identity and travel document that is valid in accordance with applicable international law; and
b) When so required, a validly issued and current visa, pursuant to Article 40 of this Law; or
c) A residence card or authorization for the immigration status of regional visitor, border worker visitor, or visitor for humanitarian reasons.
For Mexicans:
Article 36. Mexicans may not be deprived of the right to enter national territory. To this end, they must prove their nationality, in addition to complying with the other requirements established in this Law, its Regulations, and other applicable legal provisions.
Mexicans shall prove their nationality using one of the following documents:
I. Passport;
II. Citizen Identity Card, Personal Identity Card, or its equivalent;
III. Certified copy of a Birth Certificate;
IV. Consular Registration Card;
V. Letter of Naturalization; or
VI. Certificate of Mexican Nationality.
I'm not interested in debating whether this *law* is compatible with Mexico's constitution. That has in fact been litigated, and Mexico's Supreme Court has "recognized the constitutionality of the immigration authority's power to request documents from foreign nationals to verify their legal entry, stay, and departure from the country." (https://tirant.com/mx/actualidad-juridica/noticia-inconstitu...).
The point is, that's what the prevailing law says, and that's what's generally practiced at borders, consulates, and embassies.
> The consulate either was mistaken or wrote that because it will really suck to leave the country without it and they don't want to deal with the fallout.
Ah yes, I'm sure the entire legal apparatus of the country of Mexico is just winging it, whereas you, noble HN commenter, have sussed out the true facts. Or perhaps you just heard and believed a story from some rando at a border crossing.
Where I live in Western Australia, it is perfectly normal for 10-year-olds to be getting on their bikes and going round to their friends' houses after school.
The swing towards "Fuck Around And Find Out" parenting has been going for the last ten years here, and everybody gives you rapturous applause when you encourage kids to have their own independent playtime.
I have also never seen a man at a playground get dirty looks, in fact there are more men out with their kids than women on the weekends (fewer during weekdays).
Speaking as someone who has gotten dirty looks and questioned by mothers who wanted to know who I was, why I was at the playground, and which children were mine, it does happen or at least it did years ago when my kids were much younger.
It’s a frustrating experience that changed how I interacted with other kids on the playground that weren’t mine. It made me more careful about whether I would let another kid join our game of tag or push the kid in the swing next to us when they asked. Sad really, and truly hope things have changed.
In USA bikes are often slow enough the Karens can still stalk them and have police/CPS snatch them for being out alone. So you find kids in groups on dirt bikes or motorcycle tier "electric bicycles." The Karens can't catch them so they can actually get away and be free. Glorious to watch, aint no one can keep up with kids who practice being on a dirt bike all day who can cut right off the roads into the backcountry they know better than anyone else.
I don't allege bad intent, but I wish people would stop using "Karen" as an insult, because I know some perfectly nice people with the misfortune to have been given that name.
Funnily enough, I know a guy who went into teaching early primary school in Western Australia 20 years ago, and got driven out by the constant suspicion and ever increasing supervision imposed “for his own safety” - no touching kids, at all, to the point of not helping up a kid who falls on the playground; get a female teacher to do it.
Absolutely. My kid just started high school shortly after our social media ban started, and they only interact with their friends outside of school via phone calls and text, without the interference of addiction-optimised algorithms. It's superb.
I always had it in my control go prevent my child using social media, but I couldn't control every other child in the school using it as the way to stay in touch. This is the kind of collective action that is beneficial for kids.
I will forever remember my experience with the development of a new tool in my job as an engineer in hazardous gas processing. We had a consultant who was developing this tool that worked in a double-act with one of our engineers, and they sat there watching us use the tool. Whenever there was something we found confusing or didn't work how we wanted it to, she just said "oh I'll change that right now, give me a sec... ok press refresh it should be working now".
This tool was mainly just a form with some free-text fields, some drop-down and email notifications of each workflow step. But the fact that it was developed by constantly iterating with the users, meant that it has been adopted universally and been incredibly efficient at managing this particular workflow.
It's the only example I can remember in my 20-year career where that happened. It is more typical that there's a vast disconnect between the people with the industry experience and the people with the skills to apply fundamental IT skills to product development.
In my particular example, the IT skills required were probably completely trivial for a professional, and all the value came from tight cooperation with users.
The Noongar calendar from the south west of Western Australia is, of course, a much better fit to the local climate. We are just starting Djeran, with probably the best weather of the year, then it'll be Makuru, with by far the most rain and plenty of rainbows, and coldest temperatures. Djilba is when it just starts warming up again and at the end of Djilba is wildflower season which is probably the most beautiful time in the region. Then it's Kambarang around October November which is perfect temperature again, and then we are into Birak which is "first summer" and Bunuru "second summer". Obviously it's linked to food availability rather than the weather but it does fit far better than the British four seasons.
I've got a 12 year old in Australia and the social media ban has been amazing. Since the algorithm-distraction-machine is parasitical on users' social network, the kids just have little interest in it because their social network is not there. They aree making phone calls to each other and riding round each other's houses on bikes.
Older teenagers who already has social media accounts have generally found workarounds, but the young teenagers are just not joining up.
It's been an excellent success story of collective action overcoming the harmful effects of private profit-motivated interests. The tech giants literally could not care less about the mental health of some teenagers in Australia, but their parents do.
It's easy to simply ban one teenager from using social media but removing a teenager from their social network is a date worse than death from their perspective. So once the parasite of social media has infected teenagers' social network and established itself, teenagers were really lumped with the choice of "do I lose contact with my friends or continue using this distraction machine specifically designed to get me hooked?" and they will always choose the latter.
I was skeptical initially, but having experienced the effects, I'm incredibly impressed that for once we have put a red line against foreign private companies harming our citizens.
> I'm incredibly impressed that for once we have put a red line against foreign private companies harming our citizens.
Not enough for you to stop using it though eh? Hacker news, sorry to tell you, is a "distraction machine specifically designed to get (you) hooked". So are books but that's a good kind of distraction obviously.
My solution to this is that I ring my bell when I'm far from people, usually twice while I'm still a fair way away. It just gets pedestrians conscious that there's a bike around, while also being far enough away that it's not going to surprise them and I don't think they assume it's an aggressive bell.
My least favourite is when a cyclist speeds past and shouts "on ya right" (I'm in Australia) but they shout it when they're so close that there's no chance of hearing and understanding in time.
That's how I do it too. I'll tap bell once (and let the ring sustain) when I'm about ~5 seconds from overtaking them so people know there's something coming up behind them, and the sustained sound tells them how fast it's coming. This is especially important with runners, who are prone to suddenly take a U-turn if they're at the end of their route.
Pedestrians regularly wave acknowledgement or even say "thank you." Some other cyclists (especially on e-bikes) just blast by with no warning.
The problem with bells is that they aren't very directional. It's hard for my brain to figure out from which direction the sound is coming from. Someone speaking "on your left" is much more directional, and it includes important context as to what the warning is about.
I'm an engineer in the oil and gas industry. Some of my job involves messy judgement calls that I would never involve LLMs in, but some of my job boils down to integrating different items of data that exist across documents, drawings and a few databases that are in different formats and don't cross reference each other. At times I have used LLMs as a kind of "highly enhanced search engine" to do semantic search across documentation of every different types. My alternative was opening each document and using ctrl+f, along with my intuition of knowing what document titles to search for.
For a more concrete example, I have an interface to the data that comes from every sensor on the oil processing facility. It has a built in "AI" (I try not to use that term!) but it has a feature where I ask how to process data in plain language and it'll give me the calculations, then it'll also provide a plain language summary of all the calculations I conducted. That saved me 10 hours of work.
I am a negative nancy on LLMs in general but I still passionately believe that they're a tool which every white collar employee will need to learn to use effectively.
I cringe when I hear engineers say "I didn't know the answer so I asked ChatGPT" but I also do worry that I could be significantly outperformed by another engineer with 10 years less experience in engineering and 1 year more experience in judicious use of LLMs.
Sorry I didn't see your comment until now, apologies for the late reply.
A classic messy judgement call would be:
1. Input information includes some word of mouth info that I have no reason to doubt, but also absolutely no way of verifying against field data
2. A single piece of equipment is not functioning - the plant is reasonably safe to operate with the failure, but how safe? Are the other relevant protective layers in place and effective in the relevant scenarios?
3. If I decide to implement a really robust and good-quality solution that'll stand the test of time, will it actually take so long to implement that I would have been better off with something simpler but less robust?
4. Is my decision making process clearly communicated enough for the decision makers involved? Which installation manager is on shift?
5. If the regulator audited my decision making process would they raise a recommendation? So what if there's a 0.1% risk that they'll raise a recommendation as long as people are safe?
These kinds of thought processes are where I add value as an engineer in a way that's irreplaceable by LLMs. I just hope that LLMs can really improve how quickly I can access data to make my human decision-making better based in fact.
This reminds me of the opposite, which is how the cost of hydrogen for home heating is surprisingly high enough that there are several consumer goods that yield more Joules of heating value per dollar.
I once worked out that burning the IKEA LACK coffee table was better value for money than hydrogen.
Sadly international diversification is far less effective during downturns, which is exactly when you need it. It really turns out that the old adage "when the US sneezes the whole world catches a cold" is borne out by the evidence: https://earlyretirementnow.com/2017/08/23/how-useful-is-inte...
I started getting concerned about the US stock market being overvalued in about 2019. If I'd followed my gut and ditched the US entirely I'd have missed out enormously.
Unfortunately the "guys, it's getting a bit frothy" stage can last for years and years. If you pull out of the stock market whenever everything's looking irrationally overvalued you're probably going to fall behind the unthinking approach of continually investing the same amount every month.
Although I don't think investments are easy to "bubble-proof" I feel like your career choices can make you more resistant to catastrophe. The strongest strategy of all (if it's practical in your lifestyle) is to be nationally and internationally mobile so that your job search can cover the entire world, and you pick whichever employer is most desperate to find someone. After that, you can sometimes transfer internally to teams that are more robust (in my industry we have teams that design new facilities and teams that run existing facilities - the ones that design new facilities are far more vulnerable to ups and downs as projects get cancelled). Finally, you can make lots of casual contacts in your industry (we sometimes get together for coffee or beer with other people in our city who do a similar job at other companies) - then when you're made redundant, you've got the inside information of where new roles might come from.
On the cost side of the equation, your choices of "how big a house & car can I afford?" should learn towards being more pessimistic, but often there's not huge scope for choice there in the short term.
Long story short, the glib answer to your question "where do I put my money now, knowing that everything's going to blow up?" is "leave it in the S&P 500 and be aware that one day it will blow up"
If I lived in France I doubt I would travel outside of the Schengen Area.
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