Peg's Place

They wear suits, but they don't even know basic etiquette.

First: THIS RECALL IS NOT STATE SPECIFIC. IT IS NATIONWIDE.

here are the specific products and dates:

FDA page on this:

Lego's Q3 2025 earnings announcement, October 2025

So Lego just posted another monster quarter and everyone's doing the usual "timeless appeal of analog play in the digital age" garbage and like, no, the actual story is that Lego is a privately-held Danish family company that spent the 2000s nearly going bankrupt and came out of it having figured something out that almost nobody in consumer products has figured out, which is that your core IP is the manufacturing tolerance.

Here's what I mean. A Lego brick made in 1958 still clicks perfectly onto a Lego brick made last week. That is not a marketing claim, it's a manufacturing fact, and it's enforced by tolerances measured in like two thousandths of a millimeter — the stud diameter variance on a standard 2x4 brick is famously smaller than most medical device manufacturers hit on parts going inside human bodies. Which sounds like trivia until you realize it's the entire business model: every brick ever made is compatible with every brick that will ever be made, which means the installed base isn't a depreciating asset, it's an appreciating one, because every new set expands what you can do with the bricks already in your kid's bin (and your bin, and your dad's bin in the attic).

Now compare this to basically every other toy category. Hot Wheels from 1972 don't interface with Hot Wheels from 2024 in any meaningful way — they're both little cars, sure, but the track systems have changed, the scales have drifted, the accessories are incompatible. Barbie has gone through probably a dozen body molds. American Girl dolls from the 90s have different proportions than the current ones. The entire video game industry is structured around planned incompatibility — your Switch games don't work on Switch 2, your Xbox 360 discs mostly don't work on Series X. Incompatibility is the business model, it's how you get people to rebuy.

Lego said no. Lego said the brick from 1958 will fit the brick from 2058. And this is insane, if you think about it, because it means they have voluntarily foreclosed on the single most powerful lever in consumer products, which is forcing obsolescence. Every company that sells a durable good spends enormous amounts of R&D figuring out how to make this year's product not work with last year's product without pissing the customer off too much. Apple is a master at this, Microsoft is slightly worse at it, car companies have built entire industries on it (proprietary charging connectors, OBD-II access, right-to-repair fights). Lego just... doesn't do it.

What they get in return — and this is the thing the "timeless analog charm" people miss — is that the brick becomes infrastructure. A Lego brick is not really a toy. It's a piece of durable manufacturing infrastructure that gets distributed into hundreds of millions of homes worldwide, and every new set is basically an expansion pack for an operating system that already has universal install. Which means the network effects are doing most of the work. When a grandparent buys a Lego set for a kid, they're not buying "a toy" in the sense that a Mattel product is a toy — they're depositing compatible substrate into an accumulating household stockpile, and every deposit raises the marginal utility of the next deposit.

This is also why the IP licensing deals (Star Wars, Harry Potter, the recent Nintendo stuff) work for them in a way they work for basically nobody else. When Hasbro does a Star Wars license, they're making Star Wars figures that sit on a shelf. When Lego does a Star Wars license, they're making bricks in Star Wars configurations, which means even if the kid loses interest in Star Wars in six months, the bricks get absorbed into the general pool and keep producing value. The license is temporary, the substrate is permanent, and the substrate was already the valuable part.

The near-death experience in the early 2000s is the instructive piece here, because Lego almost lost this. They went on a diversification binge — theme parks, video games, clothing, Galidor (look it up, it's hilarious) — and they started loosening the tolerances on the actual bricks because the bricks were seen as a commodity and the "brand" was seen as the valuable part. Which is exactly backwards. Jørgen Vig Knudstorp comes in in 2004, basically says the bricks are the company, tightens tolerances back up, narrows the product line, and the company starts printing money again. The takeaway the business press drew was "focus on your core competency" which is such a domesticated reading of what actually happened — the actual lesson is "the boring manufacturing discipline IS the moat, and when you think the brand is the moat, you are about to destroy the company."

Which is interesting because right now there's a huge knockoff market — Mega Bloks, Chinese brands like Lepin (which got sued into oblivion), various others — and they make bricks that are almost compatible with Lego. Almost. And it turns out almost-compatible is actually worse than incompatible, because when a kid tries to fit a knockoff into a real Lego build and the stud is 0.03mm off, the whole structure gets wobbly, and the kid learns not to mix them. The tolerance is a credential. You can counterfeit the shape but you can't counterfeit sub-thousandth precision at scale without becoming, essentially, Lego.

There’s no mention on the department’s social media feeds or even on the official website. There aren’t many details about when it was established, who is running the office, or what work it is carrying out. When WIRED reached out to ask if the office exists, the State Department wouldn’t share specific details about the office and its work.

But the office, created a year ago and seemingly named for a racist far right European plan to expel minorities and immigrants from Western nations, does exist. The office’s main purpose, according to one source familiar with the work, is to process payments possibly worth tens of millions of dollars to facilitate the deportations of immigrants to countries they may not even be from. All of this is happening, the source says, with little to no oversight.

The Office of Remigration is at the heart of the Trump administration’s dramatically expanded efforts to urge other governments, many with track records of public corruption, human rights abuses, and human trafficking, into accepting immigrants sent from the US, who are not their own citizens. This is a key part of the administration’s broader mass deportation efforts, which have repeatedly even seen US citizens deported to other countries.

“Who's to know where the money goes because there's no real monitoring, or any kind of accountability attached to these payments,” the source familiar with the work at the Office of Remigration tells WIRED. “In fact, it was made pretty explicit to us by our leadership that they weren't interested in applying the same levels of accountability as we had traditionally applied to any kind of federal funding that we were responsible for managing to international organizations or NGOs.”

In response to specific questions from WIRED, the State Department provided the following statement: “President Trump promised to reverse the Biden-era invasion of illegal aliens and once again make America a country for Americans. Remigration puts these words into action," the State Department wrote in an emailed statement not attributed to a named spokesperson. “The Office of Remigration directly addresses the top priorities of the National Security Strategy: reinstating border security as the primary element of national security and ending mass migration.”

Got a Tip?

Are you an government worker with insight into what's happening? We’d like to hear from you. Using a nonwork phone or computer, contact David Gilbert at [email protected] or securely on Signal on DavidGilbert.01.

Remigration is an extremist idea that has taken hold among far right groups in many European countries in recent years. It falsely posits that Western countries can regain their former glory by deporting all immigrants, including citizens who have failed to assimilate to western values.

For critics, the term is synonymous with ethnic cleansing. “The Trump Administration’s so-called ‘remigration’ efforts are part of an inhumane and coercive agenda, one that targets undocumented immigrants, most of whom have no criminal record, and coerces other countries to accept deportees through threats of tariffs, visa restrictions, and cuts to health and economic assistance,” says congresswoman Lois Frankel, a ranking member of the House Appropriations subcommittee on national security, Department of State, and related programs. “Migrants are being sent to these countries where they have no local ties and often do not speak the language.”

President Donald Trump and Stephen Miller, one of his key immigration advisers, both used the term in social media posts ahead of the 2024 election. “THE TRUMP PLAN TO END THE INVASION OF SMALL TOWN AMERICA: REMIGRATION,” Miller wrote on X in September 2024, sharing a screenshot of a Trump Truth Social post that mentions the term.

While Trump did not use the word again in the early days of his second term in office, in May 2025, a congressional notification from the State Department revealed that the Trump administration was planning to create an Office of Remigration within the department’s Bureau of Population, Migration, and Refugees.

The congressional notification said that the Office of Remigration would be initially staffed by personnel reassigned from the bureau’s Office of Western Hemisphere Affairs. “Those of us in the Office of Western Hemisphere didn't know what that language meant for us, and despite all of our questions, our leadership would not or could not clarify that for us,” says the source, who worked in the State Department for years. “We didn't know what was going to happen.”

The decision was praised by far right groups and leaders in the US and Europe. Martin Sellner, an Austrian activist and former member of a neo-Nazi group, told WIRED at the time that Trump’s policy “ticks many of the boxes” when asked if he believes remigration was already in action in the US.

In June and July, Trump mentioned the term remigration three times on his Truth Social platform, linking it to the work ICE was doing in relation to mass deportations. “It’s called “REMIGRATION” and, it will, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN,” Trump wrote in a July 4 post on Truth Social.

Meanwhile, employees were apparently trying to get the new office name changed.

“Our office leadership told us they had asked to have this terminology changed many, many, many times, and that they were repeatedly told no,” says the source familiar with the office’s work. “At the time there was a thought of whether this a mistake, do they know what they're talking about, do they even understand what remigration means. But clearly they did.”

By the end of 2025, staff began processing government-to-government payments for deals negotiated by the Trump administration. The money was meant to be used to ensure deportees were housed in conditions that meet basic humanitarian needs, but, according to the source, there was no oversight or transparency about how that money was used after it was sent.

While the Office of Remigration is not mentioned on the State Department’s website, a document published in January shed further light on the agency’s mission.

“Remigration and border security are central to our diplomatic engagements, especially to those in our hemisphere,” the State Department wrote in a strategic planning document published in January and covering 2026 to 2030. “That includes ensuring foreign countries facilitate the repatriation of their nationals who have no right to remain in the United States; negotiating arrangements with other countries to accept the transfer of asylum claimants and illegal aliens removed from American communities; and working with DHS to support voluntary remigration.”

In February, the Democrat minority on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee published a report that outlined the dramatic expansion of the use of third party deportations and their cost. “The total costs of the Trump Administration’s third country deportations through January 2026 are unknown but are likely upward of $40 million,” the report states. “Much of the funds were provided as lump sum payments, often before any third country nationals arrived.”

"Remigration, touted by neo-Nazis, and now our own government, is nothing more than an ethnic cleansing plan to remove migrants and people of color from the US, with no oversight and no concern for human rights,” Wendy Via, cofounder and president of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, tells WIRED.

WIRED’s source said they originally joined the State Department to help refugees. But now, they were being forced to do the opposite. Many employees have left the office in recent months. Tarrajna Dorsey had worked at the State Department for nearly seven years and left the new Office of Remigration this spring.

“I spent many years aspiring to join and contribute to [the bureau of population, refugees, and migration’s] humanitarian mission to save lives, ease suffering, and offer protection to the most vulnerable among us as a key piece of U.S. foreign policy,” Dorsey wrote in an April LinkedIn post. “As much as I will miss serving alongside such passionate, resilient, and hardworking colleagues, I do not see the current work of the Office of Remigration as aligned with that mission.”

Last month, Frankel introduced an amendment to the National Security and Department of State Appropriations bill to stop the use of federal funds to be used for third-country deportations. The amendment was defeated along party lines.

And in recent weeks, the Trump administration has once again begun promoting the idea of remigration. On May 11, the State Department released a statement about the administration’s refusal to sign up to the UN’s Global Compact on Migration, which included the line, “Our goal is not to ‘manage’ migration, but to foster remigration.”

The next day, the official X account of the White House shared a picture of Trump with the words ‘replacement migration’ crossed out and substituted with the word ‘remigration.’”—Wired

That was the exact thought process

A gay Canadian adult film star claims that he was detained for over eight hours by U.S. Customs before receiving a 10-year ban from the country. Milo Miles said he was traveling to Las Vegas from Toronto's Pearson Airport in January when a routine U.S. customs screening turned into a nightmare. "It was the worst and most painful day of my life," Miles told LGBTQ Nation. "I was subjected to derogatory comments, with an unsettling focus on my sexual orientation and my sex life." Miles said his phone and luggage were searched, and he was asked intrusive questions about his sexuality and line of work. “All of this happened on two hours of sleep. I was starving, dehydrated, and in a state of complete exhaustion. I was treated like a criminal despite having done nothing wrong. I felt coerced, manipulated, and powerless. I am devastated.” U.S. Customs has the right to deny entry to people they believe are sex workers, even if they’ve never been convicted, and will use coercive tactics to try and elicit a confession, according to Maggies, a Canadian sex worker justice organization. [...] According to Miles, who was planning on visiting his boyfriend in Florida after the award show, U.S. Customs accused him of "escorting with no evidence" and were fixated on the "gay clothes," fiber pills, and PrEP he had packed, despite finding nothing illegal in his possessions. Miles ended up missing his flight due to the lengthy interrogation. When he came back the next day to catch another flight, he was interrogated again, and this time they found evidence of his career in the porn industry. "This officer decided to be a lot more thorough with his search and interrogation," he said. "After about two hours of intense interrogation, he found evidence that I do porn on my personal phone. Then, over the next two hours found evidence of escorting on my other phone." Miles said that they never found any evidence of prostitution, but noticed text conversations he had with past escorting clients — who he mostly provides with a boyfriend experience — and current text messages where he was trying to make plans with a client in Las Vegas. "Escorting is an exchange of money for time spent with an individual," he clarified. "For example, most of my clients are looking for 'the boyfriend' experience. Or someone to go to dinner with. Prostitution is an exchange of money for sexual services. There was never any evidence of prostitution on my phone, only escorting." Getting banned from the U.S. isn’t just bad for his career — he shoots a significant portion of his adult film project in the country — but has also damaged his personal life. "I was planning on building a life in the United States with my [future] husband, with my partner, who's American," Miles said. When asked by LGBTQ Nation what advice he would give other queer travelers, he said, "Avoid the United States at all costs. It’s not worth it. It’s not worth it to put your life at risk."

Even if he were a prostitute, the government should have no right to do this to any sex worker.

Where we categorically, blatantly refuse to admit we can't tell the difference between "text", "subtext", "context" and "fanfic" and then get Big Mad when people have any opinion that isn't 100% unquestioning, untextured, unnuanced aggreement with our personal (but totally True and Absolute) interpretation.

Fuck off.

Preemptively.

Yes, you sound like a fucking heel when you insist your own personal journey is the only acceptable way to be trans.

Vital - A powerful wavetable synth, my personal favorite VST synth, very easy to figure out creating new synth sounds, with the help of the plenty of tutorials that are out there for the plug-in. (There are paid versions but they are completely unnecessary to get 99% of the features of the plug-in.)

Synth1 - A classic piece of synthesizer software.

Pendulate - An interesting, chaotic synth that you can make weird little sounds with.

Native Instruments' free plug-ins - Various cool VSTs, including the Komplete Start pack.

The Free Orchestra - A set of orchestral instruments for Kontakt Player (see previous link).

BBC Symphony Orchestra Discover - More orchestral stuff! This one has its own player so you don't have to download a separate VST to use it if you don't want to.

Magical 8bit Plug - A chiptune plug-in, intended for producing sounds like that of 8-bit systems like the NES and Master System.

Genny - A synth VST made to emulate the soundchip of the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive.

MT Power Drum Kit - A nice rock n' roll style drum kit plug-in.

This guy's weird VST collection - 6.4 gigabytes of weird VSTs, including some you might know, like Delay Lama and MeowSynth!

sforzando - A free player for soundfont files.

Musical Artifacts - A resource I mainly use to find soundfonts, on which you can find other various things as well.

Kilohearts Essentials - 30 effect VSTs including reverb, delay, compression, pitch shifting, transient shaping, ring modulation, phase distortion, and more.

Xfer's freeware VSTs - Exactly what it says on the tin, including the one and only OTT compressor.

Illformed - The good ol' dblue Glitch 1.3, Crusher, Stretch, and TapeStop.

Hysteresis and Fracture - Two interesting glitch effects, one being a delay and the other being a buffer.

Codec - A cool digital audio degradation effect.

Le Phonk - A slick distortion plug-in.

MAIM - An effect that mimics the sound of MP3 compression.

Soundly Shape it and Place it - One is simply an equalizer VST, the other is an effect that emulates a speaker (ex: a radio) and a space (ex: a cave).

Fresh Air - An effect that adds high end information to your sounds, to provide brightness.

ValhallaSupermassive - A combo reverb and delay plug-in that sounds quite big.

UnplugRed - A collection of various interesting VSTs, most of which have free versions.

Chowdhury DSP - I can't personally speak for all of these but their tape model effect is great for some lo-fi style effects.

TAL-Chorus-LX - A thick sounding chorus, good for "retro" sounds too.

Polyverse Wider - A great effect for widening sounds up, really simple too with only two controls.

Freesound - A good audio file resource, mainly for foley recordings.

Cymbatics Dubstep Starter Pack - A little sample pack with some good drum and synth samples.

fishmonger drum kit - A pack of samples from the album 'fishmonger' by Underscores!

WangleLine's sample packs - Free samples put out by my awesome mutual WangleLine!

aaand I might as well include this set of drums I made awhile back :P

Geonkick - A drum synthesis VST, especially simple to get kicks going, but capable of producing a multitude of sounds.

plugdata - A visual programming environment for plug-in projects, that people produce their own plug-ins for, such as infamous plug-in the gusher.

SoundThread (info in description) - A really cool node-based audio editing interface based on the Composers Desktop Project, great for sound design, although it currently only supports .wav files.

OpenUtau - An open source software for UTAU voicebanks like Kasane Teto, much easier to work with imo than the original UTAU software for a beginner to vocal synths like UTAU and Vocaloid.

Famitracker - More NES style chiptune stuff, this one's a classic standalone tracker program.