Thomas Jefferson, 1787

And what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure.

I think this quote puts it aptly. It obviously comes from a more tumultuous time, but the United States was borne out of the idea that violence is a valid response to injustice. Law and order are preferable to anarchy, but that doesn’t mean that all law is valid. When the laws are used to insulate the powerful few against the many, what reason is there for the many to follow the law?

This often-cited quote from Jefferson urges regular rebellion against the law so that the powerful will never lose sight of how tenuous their position is. If you let the powerful manipulate the laws for their own benefit against the interests of the rest of society, you’ll be left with a population that has no interest in upholding the law.

That is ultimately why people are happy to let this man face no consequences. People are angry at the billionaires, especially those in the health insurance industry. And this action is being picked up as a warning shot across the bow. Society is saying that we are sick of the status quo, and if things keep going as they have been, this is not going to be an isolated event.

You’re saying that it doesn’t matter because the US government is able to prove his citizenship, but that isn’t in question. The crux of this matter would be whether OP was ignorant of his citizenship and if that ignorance would have any relevance to his case.

Securing official documents only available to American citizens makes it more difficult to argue that he was ignorant of his status as an American citizen. He likely could still make a compelling argument (provided he acts quickly), but it does make it a bit more difficult.

Same thing with me and chess in high school. I learned TrueBASIC, and I didn’t learn about arrays or subroutines. But, I did manage to make a chess application that two people could play a game of chess on. It highlighted legal moves when you clicked on a piece and ensured that only legal moves were made. It also showed the captured pieces to the side of the board. I think I had it set up so that you could only promote to a previously captured piece, but all the other rules were implemented properly (or at least, I assumed they were).

The implementation involved a bunch of variables for each individual chess piece and a bunch of if statements inside a loop. I remember describing arrays and explaining that I wished they existed, but never actually found out they did until I was finished. I don’t know how many lines of code it was, but when I copied it into Word, and it spanned about 350 pages in total.

Part of me is proud of the accomplishment. Another part is horrified.

A lot of people also seem to ignore the fact that the risks are not the same for everybody.

E.g. four people get the same business opportunity. For person A, failure means they have to ask their parents to bail them out. For person B, they have to move in with their parents. For person C, they have to move their family into a tent under the bridge. And for person D, they have to ration their medication and risk dying.

Person A could probably try things out a few times without suffering too much other than embarrassment. Person B, maybe a couple times, but that’s pushing it. The others have to pretty damn sure it’ll pay off, and even then, the risk might be too much.

I started a job at a regional bank on a team that was responsible for integrating the data from newly acquired banks into their systems. The team was overworked and definitely needed more hands on deck, but they didn’t have time to train anybody new on the process. Aside from that, the organization of the team was pretty poor.

When I started, they seemed unaware that I was supposed to be starting that day, so they didn’t have a desk or anything ready for me. So that first day was a bit of a wash. The second day, they put me at a desk on the floor above the rest of my team. That was also the only time that I met the manager who hired me. It seemed like people mostly forgot about me because I didn’t really get any work assigned until a couple weeks in.

They wanted me to make one of their mapping documents (which appeared to be a SQL statement copied into a Word document with every detail meticulously documented across twenty pages). I didn’t have any idea where to start with it. The next day, they said that there is no way I could do that without training, so they took the assignment away. Over the next couple of months, I’d bring up that I didn’t have anything to work on at every morning meeting. But other than that, I just spent my day editing Wikipedia articles.

Eventually they keyed in on the fact that they were paying me $90k per year to do nothing, so they fired me. They said it was probably their fault for hiring somebody without banking experience. I don’t think banking experience would have helped.

Oh yeah, and the meeting where I was fired was also where I found out that the person firing me was my team lead.