You could buy some temporary luxuries to enjoy, or save yourself a bit of labour on something you'd normally do yourself. But you couldn't really invest in your future the way we would today - everything you depended on had to be something you could make yourself, buying an implement you couldn't maintain would be setting yourself up for trouble. Increasing your productivity with tools wasn't a huge help because you always had enough labor available to hit severely diminishing returns on the land you owned. And any object of value is always at risk of being seized by the local lord or a passing army or what have you.

Well, fair enough, but you must acknowledge that that's the democratic consensus and the law as it stands.

> Do they live here? Work here?

The person in question is on a student visa, so (assuming they're not abusing the system) sort of but not really; they're here for a few years, and they might be doing a little part-time work to support themselves but they're meant to be here to study for a limited period rather than have already moved their life here permanently, they're supposed to intend or at least be open to the possibility of going back when their course finishes.

Fair, but everything else I said goes through the same.

> Americans are rolling over and justifying terrifying out reach

I just don't see the terror? If someone is coming over here on a student visa and then doing political activism, it seems completely reasonable for the immigration authorities to check that out.

I think active political campaigning is a bit different from discussing political philosophy, and it's a major mistake to treat the former as "just free speech". (I think Citizens United was a massive misjudgement that has lead directly to many of our present-day problems). I think we're all agreed that foreigners should not be standing for office or voting in elections, and foreigners other than permanent residents are already barred from making campaign contributions; to my mind this kind of protest aimed at changing government policy falls into the same category. A protest like that isn't an effort to convey some insight or argument; it's an effort to demonstrate viscerally that the citizenry have a strong view on an issue. I don't think allowing foreign participation helps with that; quite the opposite.

There have been a lot of claims in recent years - from both sides of the aisle - that enemy countries have been deliberately disrupting US politics in order to harm the country. I think it's vital that our political process not only has integrity but is seen to have integrity, and part of that is ensuring that adversaries cannot unduly influence it.

If and when I see actually-doing-agile fail, I'll change my mind. But so far I've seen a direct correlation between the extent to which an organisation was actually-doing-agile and the effectiveness of that organisation, across a wide range of industries/environments/countries.

Push back on that. Agile says other things are more important.

That's not agile.

> A project where all the work comes directly from tickets with no overarching, agreed-upon document on what the end goal is supposed to be sounds hellish.

Maybe this is why so many people can't even try to do agile. It sounds bad. But it works great.

> The solution can never be at fault, it's your execution, or your devotion to the process (in this case) that was faulty.

This isn't some religious premise, it's the lesson of bitter experience. It's like how when two trains crash into each other the inspectors start by looking for which one went through a danger signal, rather than questioning whether signalling systems work.