These are the same degenerates that gave us GDPR and these fucking cookie pop-ups.
Oh, how awful, the EU has a privacy law and actually enforces it. Terrible, I know.
As for popups, guess what? No site has to have one. All they have to do is not do shady things with user data. Shouldn't be hard at all, but especially American sites can't manage. Open up some of the privacy policies. Some list more than 1000 sites they share your data with.
which effectively forced the Senate to consider the measures together
What a stupid way to legislate. Every bill ought to gave a single, specified purpose.
As a factor in migration, global warming doesn't move the needle off of zero. Failed politics in certain countries, leading to warfare, gangs, and poverty - that's what drives the stream of migrants.
The US is big, but even the US is not able to absorb an infinite number of migrants. Also, note the failure of countries all along the routes. The first photo in the NPR article you reference is of a stream of migrants, and is captioned as "border control" in Panama. Only - there is no "control" to be seen on that border. Panama could stop many of the migrants there, instead of just passing them through. The same goes for all of the other national borders that they cross, but most countries are just happy that the migrants aren't staying - that they are going to be someone else's problem.
It's also specious that you blame this, or indeed anything, on one political party in the US. Both have had control of Congress at various times; indeed, in the past 3 decades it has mostly been the democrats. The thing is: the two parties are two sides of the same coin. It's not D vs. R, or blue vs. red. It's the political and economic elite against everyone else. Public differences are for show - it's easier to rule a divided populace. If the populace were to open its eyes to the real source of their problems, the guillotines might come out.
What we need to understand is why we can't build stuff.
As a semi-serious answer, I think a lot of it is the current mindset both in Western politics and business. Everything has to provide short-term benefits, whether it's the politicians thinking about the next election, or the shareholders looking to next quarter's numbers. Infrastructure projects require a long-term view. Hence, they (a) don't get the attention they need and (b) are tossed around on the stormy waves of ever-changing short-term objectives.
Your math needs some work. Monthly, Texas sees 5000-10000 illegal migrants crossing the border. We don't know how many they don't see and therefore cannot count. So let's take the 10000 as a likely total figure. times 12 months/year, times your 20 years. You want to pay $50k/year, and on average (over 20 years) you would pay that for 10 years. That is a lot more than $6 billion.
Ok, I'm being facetious, because I know you didn't really mean the number seriously. But: what is it about the word "illegal" that people like you don't get? There are legal ways to immigrant into any country. People attempting illegal entry need to be immediately and forcefully deported. It would be far more effective to stop them at the border in the first place.
Texas isn't "showboating" except in the sense that they are showing up the federal government's failures. While, at the same time, trying to stem the flood of illegal immigration.
Living in Switzerland, I use trains a lot. They're great, no question.
Having read story after story about commuter rail and high-speed rail in the USA, and having ridden on trains there a couple of times? I cannot imagine this project succeeding. It is more likely a trough for distributing pork. The schedule will be delayed year after year, more money will be poured into the trough, and ultimately someone will take passengers from LA to Las Vegas on a mule cart.
Am I overly cynical?
I kept up quite well through my mid-40s. I stopped, not because I couldn't keep up, but because I got tired of seeing the wheel be reinvented time and again.
New blippet - does the same thing as the old blippet, only differently. Rewrite and re-test all your code! What fun!
It's a stupid treadmill, because each new crop of developers thinks they know better and are smarter than their predecessors. Hint: they don't and they aren't.
You're trolling? Please say you're trolling?
Look, if the police can get a warrant, they can get a warrant to spy on one of the endpoints. Encryption becomes irrelevant.
Compromising encryption for everyone goes far, far beyond that. It endanger s everyone, and enables whole new levels of criminality.
Police forces are supposed to protect citizens. Dropping E2EE would open the doors to all sorts of crime.
Unbelievable.
Splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen, fine. Takes a lot of energy. Then they spend more energy crushing rock and using it for the CO2 removal process. They don't say what their energy source is going to be. More, as one critic in the article writes: instead of using that energy to crush rock and process seawater, wouldn't it be better to just use it to directly replace fossil fuel usage?
Sounds like yet another great behicle to provide "greenwashing".
After the 2008 debacle, one thinks of banks, when one hears "too big to fail". We (the collective world) were supposed to ensure that no single institutions remained "too big to fail" - not that we've done that.
Anyway. No single company should be allowed to become so large that its failure would be a catastrophe. That's just another aspect of anti-trust regulations. I submit that Microsoft has long since passed that threshold. Entire governments, indeed, all governments in the West are utterly dependent on Microsoft software. That should ring all sorts of alarm bells.
It's been a while since I looked into EMP and nuclear weapons, but I think you may underestimate the dangers. Your processor may be safe inside a metal box, but EMP will induce a voltage spike in the wires is uses to get power and to talk to the outside world. Are *all* of those wires shielded? Almost certainly not.
Your point about a CME is accurate, but just imagine the voltage that EMP can induce in power lines. I'm less worried about the high voltage ones, and more worried about the low-voltage lines directly supplying houses and businesses. Finally: To be devastating, EMP doesn't have to take out everything. A random 5% would already be devastating.
interlard - vt., to intersperse; diversify -- Webster's New World Dictionary Of The American Language