It's true, Ercot failed to keep the electricity on when Texas experienced its worst and longest freeze in 125 years. If California had its worst rainstorms in 125 years, it too would suffer extreme damage (sound familiar?). But wait, it only takes a *regular* summer in California to spawn thousands of wildfires. Again, pick your poison, every place has its issues when it comes to weather and natural disasters.

Ercot also can't keep the A/C on in summer. Unlike a rare freeze event, it gets hot in Texas every summer. It shouldn't catch them off guard.

Severe rainstorms are natural disasters. Texas' disasters are entirely man-made due to Ercot's incompetence. In the freeze case, they knew for decades that they should have winterized their equipment but neglected to do so.

Other places in America don't have this problem, just the Bay Area.

No, not just the Bay Area. (San Francisco is only #6 on the list.)

Don't want to live in a bed pod? Consider moving somewhere, anywhere else.

Not anywhere else. Typically, young and/or single people want to be where there's actual stuff to do including nightlife, not to mention jobs.

With the possible exception of Austin, there's nothing special about anywhere in Texas, not to mention that you roast in the summer and freeze in the winter due to the incompetent Ercot.

California has already mandated GPS-linked speed limit governors and mandatory retrofits of those onto existing cars. It is coming.

AFAICT, a bill was proposed, but is not yet law. The bill says only that new cars would be required to have limiters.
However, DC has passed a law requiring retrofits only for reckless drivers.

.. if that land ownership claim was actually respected, the title would be handed back. I don't see anybody doing that.

It occasionally happens. That aside, I generally agree with you. Either you own the land or you don't. "Sacred" is generally a silly concept.

Sure, let the government run it. Without privatization, there is no competition, without competition quality begins a steady but certain decline.

So I guess all of our police forces, fire fighters, and the entire US military is pretty bad because the government runs those.

.. the problem with this is that they want to censor things AND claim the protections of being a "platform" instead of a "publisher."

It doesn't matter!

The human brain is incredible in may ways...but computers do things human brains cannot...and unless we're willing to put up with the shortcomings of the human brain in our computing equipment, we'll likely need more than 27 watts to make it happen.

NVRAM has existed for a while, is much better than human memory, and uses no power when not being accessed. I get the point you were trying to make, but the limiting things that human brains are bad at and computers are great at is raw computational speed and doing things in parallel. Humans can typically only focus attention on one thing at a time and do it slowly.

Photoshop has been around for quite some time.

Yes, but even with a tool like Photoshop, it still took a nontrivial amount of skill and effort to make faked photos look real: making the paste seem-less, getting the skin tone to match, getting the lighting and shadow angles to match, etc. Modern AI apps allow anyone to make real-looking faked photos with no skill at the click of a button.

If you sell a copyrighted work, you are infringing on the copyright holder's exclusive rights to distribution.

No. If I make an unauthorized copy, then (and only then) I am infringing regardless of whether I sell it. Copyright (literally, the right to copy) is only about copying, not distribution. It's not "distribution-right."

If I legally obtained an authorized copy or copies, I'm free to sell it/them or do anything else with it/them I want (except copy it/them or make derivative works unless I have been granted permission to do so by the copyright holder).

No, getting fired for insubordination is not retaliation.

Yes, it is. But it's justifiable retaliation. The people who cried "retaliation" clearly don't understand that just because something is retaliatory doesn't make it unjustified.

That's like a 10yr old trying to give me their opinions on different wines. They aren't allowed to have wine, and if they did get their hands on it somehow, I'm not listening to their opinions because their opinions are meaningless.

Everyone's opinions on wine are meaningless.

⦠I strongly oppose a ban on the principle that it amounts to a ⦠lot of Americans having their free speech rights being stifled.

Even though I think the alleged threat is way overblown (what, exactly, would the Chinese government do with all the data that Johnny watches videos on underwater checkers matches), I don't buy the 1st amendment argument since, as you noted, there are alternatives.

Few rights are absolute. For example, just because the 2nd amendment says you can bear arms (and never specifically mentions guns) doesn't mean you can legally own a rocket launcher. There are also plenty of laws that implement "time and manner" restrictions that have survived constitutional scrutiny. For another example, just because you can rant on a street corner doesn't mean you can do so with a megaphone at 3am. So a ban would say that you can express yourself online all you want, just not with TikTok.