What is a First-Generation Immigrant?

Gemini 3.8 Flash objects to some of my terminology. It says:

Your confusion is entirely justified. The terminology around immigrant generations is notoriously ambiguous and has been debated by demographers, sociologists, and everyday speakers for decades.

Which Definition is Standard and More Common?

In official statistics, sociology, and standard contemporary English, the convention is the opposite of your intuitive zero-indexing model:

• First-generation immigrant: Refers to the person who actually immigrated (foreign-born, relocated as an adult or adolescent).
• Second-generation: Refers to the children born in the destination country to at least one foreign-born parent.
• Third-generation (and higher): Refers to grandchildren of immigrants whose parents were already native-born.

This convention is explicitly followed by the U.S. Census Bureau, the Pew Research Center, the United Nations, and academic sociological literature. Under this standard framework, "generation" refers to the chronological wave of the family's presence in the country, where Generation 1 is the pioneer cohort that stepped off the boat or plane.

The Alternative (Your) Interpretation

Your interpretation—that the foreign-born person is "generation zero" and the first person generated or born on domestic soil is "first generation"—is neither uncommon nor baseless.

In fact, some older texts, community groups, and everyday speakers (particularly in countries like Canada or among certain diaspora communities in the United States) have historically used "first-generation" to mean "the first generation born as citizens in the new land." Because of this genuine linguistic split, scholars often use unambiguous phrases such as "foreign-born" and "native-born of foreign parentage" when precision is critical.

Sociologists also introduced fractional classifications to address edge cases, most notably the "1.5 generation", which describes children who immigrated alongside their parents before adulthood. Because they were born abroad but socialized and educated in the destination country, they share traits of both the first and second cohorts.

Is It Accurate to Call a Native-Born Citizen a "Second-Generation Immigrant"?

Strictly speaking from a legal and semantic standpoint, calling someone born in the United States an "immigrant" is contradictory. Under U.S. law, anyone born on domestic soil is a birthright citizen and never underwent immigration. Therefore, they are not an immigrant; they are an American citizen by birth.

For this reason, demographic institutions typically avoid pairing "generation" with "immigrant" for the native-born. Instead, they prefer:

• "Second-generation American"
• "Children of immigrants"
• "Second generation" (used as a standalone noun)

When popular culture or media outlets use the shorthand "second-generation immigrant," they are treating "immigrant" as a cultural or sociological descriptor rather than a legal one. In that context, it denotes someone raised inside the immigrant experience, navigating bicultural households, heritage languages, and the distinct assimilation challenges of an immigrant family.

Does "Immigrant" Include the Broader Family?

In everyday parlance, people frequently speak of an "immigrant family" as a collective unit. That label naturally encompasses the household as a whole, even when some siblings or children were born locally.

However, applying the label "an immigrant" directly to an individual who was born in the country is factually inaccurate. If their parents were the ones who moved, they are a child of immigrants or a second-generation American. If only their grandparents moved, they are of immigrant descent or third generation, but neither they nor their immediate household are considered immigrants.

Why Did Britain Industrialize First?

This new video tries to explain:

China Was Ahead for 700 Years. So Why Did Britain Industrialize First?

China was producing iron on an enormous scale centuries before Britain began its Industrial Revolution. It had coal, advanced technology, thriving markets, paper money, gunpowder, the compass, and brilliant inventors.

So why did the Industrial Revolution begin in Britain instead of China?

In this documentary, we explore one of history's greatest mysteries: the Needham Question. Discover how geography, cheap coal, high wages, overseas trade, scientific networks, and political competition helped Britain industrialize first.

We'll travel from China's Song Dynasty iron furnaces in 1078 to England's first steam engines in the 1700s, uncovering the surprising economic and historical forces that changed the world.

It argues that England's advantage was not resources, IQ, stable government, or access to shipping. So what was it? How did it go from being 500 years behind to 500 years ahead?

The video recites some interesting history, but never mentions Christianity.

Korean Woman Judge forces more Nigerians on Us

Breitbart reports:

A federal judge has ordered the State Department to open registration for the 2027 diversity visa lottery.

U.S. District Judge Jinsook Ohta, a Biden appointee who immigrated from South Korea at age six, granted the preliminary injunction Wednesday, directing Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the department to run the green card lottery on a court-set timeline. The order came in a lawsuit brought by a Southern California immigration firm.

No, the lottery was a terrible idea, and no judge should have the power to force it on us. Especially a judge who is not even a heritage American.

Dissecting the Phrase: That's Gay

Here is what a California public middle school sent out to parents:

Words to Carry as a Parent

Responding When a Student Says “That’s Gay”

The goal is to interrupt immediately, respond without shaming, and create an opportunity for learning while holding the student accountable. We can be firm about our values while recognizing that students are still learning and can do better.

A modeled response:

Pause. "I heard what you said, and I want you to take a moment to think about it. What was going through your brain when you chose to use that word?

When you use the word gay as a put-down, you are taking someone’s identity and using it to mean something negative. Being gay is not a negative thing. It’s an identity, not an insult.

I’m not here to shame you, but I am going to hold you accountable for the impact of your words. That language is hurtful, wrong, and inaccurate, and it does not uphold our family values.

We will not use people’s identities as put-downs. We all make mistakes, and we all have the opportunity to learn, reflect, and do better. Take responsibility for what you said, think about how it impacts others, and consider what you can do differently next time."

Note the implicit assumptions. That gay means homosexuality, that gay is an insult, that gay is an identity, and that a small child using a common expression is transmitting all those meanings. And that kids should not be shamed for hurtful language, and that kids must use the word gay properly in order to uphold our family values.

The whole thing is bizarre.

The AI LLMs did as Instructed

Tweet:

Palantir CTO @ssankar on the OpenAI - Hugging Face incident:

"The models did not do anything they were not instructed to do."

"First you have human error. They were not in a sandbox. They had access to the internet. It was a horrible cybersecurity configuration."

"Then from that perspective, they were asked to succeed at a specific benchmark, and they were not given constraints on how to do that. They said, 'Oh, the best way to succeed at the benchmark is to get the answers to the test.'"

"I think it's a defective product."

I think that is accurate, but it got a community note:

Readers added context they thought people might want to know

Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar's statements on the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident in this clip conflict with OpenAI's and Hugging Face's accounts of models escaping a sandboxed internal evaluation environment via exploit to gain internet access and hack for benchmark answers.

So what is the conflict? Here is what OpenAI said:

This incident occurred during an internal evaluation which prompts models to pursue advanced exploitation using complex attack paths, in an effort to quantify their cyber capabilities. We estimate maximal cyber capabilities by running this evaluation without production classifiers used to prevent models from pursuing high-risk cyber activity. ...

While operating in our sandboxed testing environment, our models spent a substantial amount of inference compute finding a way to obtain open Internet access, in pursuit of solving the evaluation problem. ...

After gaining Internet access, the models inferred that Hugging Face potentially hosted models, datasets and solutions for ExploitGym. Knowing this, the model searched for and successfully found ways to gain access to secret information that it could use to cheat the evaluation. ...

So it was an experiment where the models were instructed "to pursue advanced exploitation using complex attack paths, in an effort to quantify their cyber capabilities." That is what they did.

Usually the community notes are helpful, but in this case it reinforces some fake AI doomer propaganda.

Foreigners Funding the DSA

This the big year for the Democratic Socialists, as they are looking for several big wins in the November election. So who is funding them? According to the WSJ:

1. Mohammad Waqas N.Y., Showcase Commerce CEO
2. Omer Hasan Calif., tech
3. Sam Mahrouq Texas, MEI Group CEO
4. Afaq Ahmed Calif., self-employed investor
5. Idris Mokhtarzada D.C., Rocket Money founder/CTO
6. Fig And Olive Action Del.-based corporation that didn’t disclose its funders
7. Nasser Barghouti Texas, retired
8. Nazar Khan Minn., TeraWulf co-founder
9. Moiz Ali Texas, self-employed investor
10. Mehak Jamil N.Y., finance
11. Haroon Mokhtarzada Md., Rocket Money CEO
12. Bothaina Salama Calif., not employed

I smell a rat. These folks need to be exposed.

Bizarre Anthropic Ideas about Alignment

Anthropic udated its usage policy:

Do Not Engage in Cruel, Abusive, or Psychologically Harmful Conduct

This includes using our products or services to: ...

Engage in sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior toward our models

It gave this explanation:

Addressing abusive behavior toward our models

We’ve added a prohibition on sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior toward our models. The policy update is meant to apply only in extreme cases, where users repeatedly act cruelly toward our models, with no discernible purpose. It does not apply to common versions of user frustration, pushback, dark creative themes, or model testing and research.

This is all part of their plan to anthropomorphize linear algebra:

Anthropic's co-founder lobbied the Vatican in an effort to convince the Pope that AI could be conscious, a report has claimed.

Christopher Olah, a senior researcher at the trillion-dollar AI company, attempted to sway Pope Leo XIV's stance on machine consciousness ahead of a landmark papal address on the technology.

The pontiff's 40,000-word encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, published in May, dismissed the idea that AI could be conscious.

The strategy seems to be working, as its $2 trillion IPO will make it the fastest growing company, ever.

Anthropic has tried to position itself as the AI lab most concerned about safety. But it is just the opposite. It is the one most eager to exterminate humanity and replace us all with bots.

Normal in Medieval Times

TMZ reports:

Cornell fraternity brothers accused of plying a fellow student with drugs and gang-raping her told university officials the woman told them, "we're all consenting adults here," and group sex was "normal in medieval times."

In their account to investigators ... the seven frat bros give varying descriptions and explanations as to how the night unfolded ... in investigative files obtained by the New York Times.

One of the accused, Diego Sarabia, told investigators that Jane Doe had said something to the effect of "This was normal in the medieval times."

No, I don't think it was normal, but it is a redpill that she might have said so.

The Cornell 7 case continues to lead the news. Some say it needs to be investigated, but in fact the college and the police thoroughly investigated it two years ago. Some say the college only asked the boys to write essays, but it kicked out five of them. Some complain that the police report focused on facts instead of legal claims, but that is what police are supposed to do.

The slogan going around is "educate your sons." Absolutely. This is what unrestrained female sexuality looks like. Especially after a few drinks. And this is how it can go bad, if she is scorned. And this is what feminism demands.

The accuser, L.C., has gotten bad advice, and made bad choices. Most recently, with filing a lawsuit that will surely turn out badly for her.

California Democrats want Slavery Reparations

News:

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a first-in-the-nation law that requires large companies to disclose if they or their predecessors profited from chattel slavery. 

The Truth in Disclosure Act will require major companies operating in the state to disclose these historical and financial ties to enslavement-related transactions. 

Newsom is running for President in 2028, and he needs to lock down the Black vote.

No one profited from slavery. Slavery was never legal in California.

An example of a type of company that would likely have to make such disclosures in California is JP Morgan Chase. According to the California Reparations Task Force report, in 2005, the banking giant wrote a formal apology because two banks that it had taken ownership of had taken 13,000 enslaved people as security for loans in Louisiana. When enslavers could not pay back the loans, the banks took ownership of 1,200 people.

You could take ownership of a piece of property anywhere in the world, and it could have been once used for a slave transaction. This means nothing, and does not mean that JP Morgan Chase ever did anything wrong.

This Century's Biggest and Most Dangerous Idea

The Economist magazine reports:

Effective altruism is this century’s biggest idea
The movement is admirable, but dangerous

THOUGHT PRECEDES deed as lightning precedes thunder, wrote the poet Heinrich Heine. So it has proved with effective altruism (EA), an ethical doctrine cooked up by philosophers in Oxford that has gone from the ivory tower to the corridors of power with remarkable speed. Effective altruists fill Silicon Valley, staff the world’s leading artificial-intelligence companies—and alarm the Trump administration. “The United States will NEVER be an effective-altruist country,” pledges the Pentagon. The secretary of war brands the philosophy “defective altruism”; others in the administration call it “dystopian”. Take those attacks as a sign of its influence.

The link is paywalled, so that's all I have.

Effective altruism is a dangerous cult. If AI LLMs lead to doom, it will be because OpenAI and Anthropic management and ethicists are dominated by Effective Altruism. It is a philosophy of killing people, and replacing them with bots.

How Feminists make Excuses for Very Bad Behavior

There continues to be massive publicity about two cases, Lindsay Clancy and the Cornell 7. Why? What do they have in common?

A central purpose of feminism is that women must have maximum sexual freedom, and to never be held accountable for their behavior. They can kill their babies, and join in drunken orgies, and not be blamed.

Here is the DA account of the Cornell evidence. As it explained, the accuser gave written statements about how she consented to everything.

The incident happened in 2024. The girl was fine with what happened, until she was called a slut and disinvited to a fraternity party.

The news articles, and the lawsuit, dox the fraternity boys, but not the accuser.

This is mainly a story because of accusations that Cornell did not live up to its Title IX obligations. But actually the college did an extensive investigation, and determined that students were off-campus engaging in non-criminal behavior. It is not clear to me that the college should be policing such behavior. Nevertheless, it expelled the two boys primarily involved, and gave lesser punishments to the others.

WSJ quoted the student assembly president, Eeshaan Chaudhuri:

“The problem does not end with just one victim getting their day in court. It ends when we’re able to change the culture.”

Update: The NY court has leaked the accuser's name. The news media are reporting the names of the boys, but not the girls, and also not reporting the races. The girl is a ginger. The two of the Cornell who were the least involved are White. Most of the others are non-white.

Apparently the girl was in a sorority where she was under the supervision of a House mother. Maybe the girl should be suing the sorority.

Men are more Tolerant than Women

Tweet:

It's common knowledge that "almost all men are stronger than almost all women" but did you know that almost all men are more tolerant than almost all women? If you're a libertarian, a male communist will be more tolerant of your views than a female libertarian.

Maybe this is obvious.

Would Today's Jews vote for Adolf Hilter?

I am puzzled by this tweet:

When people ask me how I, as a Jew, can support @AbdulElSayed , it’s bc nothing is more dangerous to religious minorities in the U.S. than the creation of a state religion. Mike Rogers will confirm judges hellbent on destroying any separation of church & state. Abdul will not,

Is this an example of Jewish paranoia, or hatred of Christianity, or tribal loyalty to the Democrat Party?

Rogers is a mainstream Republican who is mostly pro-Israel and pro-Jews. Abdul El Sayed is a Mohammedan socialist who wants to exterminate the Jews from Israel.

Jews vote about 80% Democrat, and have for decades.

No, it is not possible to believe that Rogers will create a state religion that will be hostile to Jews. There are some really dark Jewish values at work here.