The costs you mention are also symptoms, not causes. Medicare costs are astronomical precisely because American medical care costs several times more than equivalent care elsewhere in the world. That's not because American care is somehow better... it's because there's no effective regulation on prices for a service with very little effective competition.

As for the heights of doorknobs and the care of prisoners, those are actually our government doing the thing it's supposed to do: Improving the quality of life for its citizens, including allowing those in wheelchairs to access public buildings and allowing prisoners to have critical (but not life-essential) surgeries like joint replacement (which is still considered "elective").

One of the causes is that American politicians think America is special, but we're really not. We're not the biggest country in any term except raw GDP. We're not the largest, or most populous, or the wealthiest (Qatar or China, depending on definition). We don't have a natural monopoly on any major resources, we don't control any critical locations, and we don't actually have much for socioeconomic mobility. We no longer even have the most free speech, thanks to media consolidation and the chilling effects of certain legislation.

The policy lessons other countries have learned could apply perfectly well here, but we simply choose to ignore them, in favor of clinging to the dream of American exceptionalism.

The exceptionalism myth certainly predates Trump, but Trump is responsible (despite his comments to the contrary) for the decisions his administration has made. He chose to leave key leadership positions unfilled, leaving the nation vulnerable to disasters. He chose to grant tax cuts that primarily benefit the wealthy, at the expense of small businesses and individuals who need social services. He continues to choose to prioritize support based not on need, but by the amount of praise he's received.

Electing an overgrown child to the highest office in the nation is a symptom of a broken society, sure... but exacerbating our current cost of emergency response was directly caused by our current so-called leader.

So in other words, anyone affected by a disaster should just stop being poor. Got it.

Of course, after you spend your savings on one disaster, then you're not prepared for the second disaster. In a run of particularly bad luck, only those with ample savings will survive. Those that don't have literally nothing to lose, so they might as well try their hand at massive armed robbery to get the wealth they need to survive... and it turns out we just reinvented warlords.

You might as well just say openly what you really mean: you want survival of the richest, and don't care about society at all.

The old adage of "a stitch in time saves nine" applies here. Our safeguards and disaster-prevention systems were dismantled and effectively sold for stock market gains. Now we need them, and it turns out it's a lot more difficult (and expensive) to rebuild that capacity under immediate pressure for an immediate need.

This has happened several times before, and yet we keep dancing the same tune. The more we dismantle the government, the more the price rises when we realize how badly we need a strong government. The days of self-sufficient nomads are long gone. It was first said about revolutionaries, but another old line now holds true for individuals in our society: "We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately."

I really don't think the 1929 depression caused the 1914 World War.

From a simple perspective, WWI was caused by the arrogance of old empires, who suddenly found themselves facing an industrialized world of global interaction. The old notion of having a war confined to border zones and perpetrated by individual soldiers really didn't apply now that global logistics and mechanized weapons were a reality.

WWII (in Europe, at least) was caused by a number of unresolved issues from WWI, primarily the issue of human dignity. The Central Powers were decimated at the end of WWI, and that humiliation was ripe for exploitation by the power-hungry Nazi party (and sympathizers). They blamed the Jews, the Roma, the "intellectuals", and anyone else they felt like, gathering public support by offering scapegoats. While the Great Depression certainly worsened the public frustration, the rallying cry was one of nationalism, not capitalism.

...And she refused to testify there, too, and went through the whole contempt process again.

For those of you following along at home, she's now leaving jail for the third time.

It's a sad day for the booth babe industry...

The rest of the world moves on, though.

Out of curiosity, what's the method to show that the barcode that was printed actually matched your paper ballot?

Would it be possible to hack a machine such that some percent of the time, it just ignored your vote and prints a barcode to say you picked the other guy?

The primary purpose of most public VPNs' existence is to take money from paranoiacs. Should I now be surprised they're taking personal data, too?

Only the numbers, I'm afraid. The actual problems are widely-reported, and I've seen a good number of them myself in recent hiring activities in my company (a very large multinational engineering firm). I have some spare time, so I'll elaborate:

This is a side effect of having bureaucracy in the initial job-listing process. A knowledgeable manager says "we need skill with these new technologies", a good-intentioned manager says "we need someone with experience", and a HR manager puts that together into a listing that says "lots of experience in a new thing".

Management doesn't want to pay for office space for all employees, but they don't want to deal with time zones or having assets scattered across the country, and old management practices often haven't been updated to accommodate a remote workforce... so they require employees to be near a physical location. Since they're being so very flexible with the location, management won't authorize relocation packages. It works fine if you happen to already be near one of their branches, but if not, you're looking at paying out-of-pocket for moving expenses or airfare for in-person meetings.

A side effect of the professional culture being forced into the home. In a previous job, I was making video calls to discuss finances with high-net-worth individuals. A proper suit and tie were the mandatory dress code, even when working from home.

Wage stagnation has been discussed extensively, but a more insidious problem is the mislabeling of positions as "entry-level". My company currently has a listing for an entry-level position with FORTRAN experience. Nobody entering the job market has FORTRAN experience, but the project's budget doesn't allow for hiring a full-time position at anything above an entry-level salary, and apart from the language, the technical difficulty is indeed minimal.

The only number made up here is the "7 managers" bit. Otherwise, that's the policy for a major hospitality company near me. Two weeks of unpaid leave with 6 months' notice and approval. Oddly enough, they have a reputation for losing people after vacations.

The requirement for a H1-B is that the US company must try to find qualified Americans to take the job. A common method is to show that a job listing has sat unfilled for a long time... but if the listing is ridiculous (such as the skills/experience/salary disparity), The company can then recruit anyone under an H1-B, pay them the meager entry-level salary, and keep complaining about the lack of skilled workers in America.

The unfortunate side effect of being a foreign employee in America: It's always temporary. Having a visa is contingent on having employment with that particular company. If a H1-B worker is fired, they have at most 60 days to leave the country or find another employer willing to sponsor their visa. If the new job search doesn't work out, that means 60 days to break an apartment lease, sell a car, sever social ties, find a new place to live outside the US, make travel arrangements, and get out.

The days of walking to a company and asking for a job are long-gone... but of course, it's generally prohibited to use a computer from your current employer to find a new one, and using public computers at a library becomes difficult to save resumes or consistently have access to respond to emails.

To be fair, the company I saw requiring this did finally upgrade their application system... last October.

The text fields on an application are what's used for the HR system to search for keywords, but they usually still require a PDF to be sent to the hiring manager. Again, that means more work for the applicant, who has to make sure their resume looks good for a computer scanning the text and a human reading the printed page. That, in turn, exacerbates the difficulty of the application for those who don't have reliable access to their own computer.

This bit's from everyone's favorite Big Evil Corporation, Amazon. They built an AI for hiring, and trained it by feeding in the resumes that humans ultimately selected. Unfortunately, those humans were biased, and the AI learned to reject alumni from certain women-only colleges, and avoid people who had participated in women's-rights activism.

Again, this is from the bureaucracy in the process. HR will take a month to gather applicants, then send the applications to the hiring manager who will review them for a month, then another month to pass the candidates back to HR, then another month to conduct phone interviews, then another month to make an offer to the first-choice candidate, then another month for them to fully accept and start work, then another month to verify the listing can be closed and send rejection notices.

In the end, it sucks to have to find a new job, and even more so if you have any kind of disadvantage in accessing the technology to do so. The notion of "Don't like your job? Walk across the street and find better employment." is what really needs a vivid imagination today.

Personally, I think that's what the "back-end analysis" is that they're talking about (though I really don't know for sure how the project was laid out). The distributed work was to take the signal data and look for anything that might conceivably be useful data, in mathematical rather than anthropocentric terms. Fourier transforms for periodic components, matching signals on different frequencies, and things like that. It's nothing that would say "here are aliens", but more "This is what the data looks like if viewed this way".

Once that expensive processing is done, then the data can be reviewed for various hypotheses of "alien signals might look like this". That should be a much simpler lookup against the generated results, and doesn't need a massive distributed project. For example, now that Earth has begin encrypting many (most?) of its signals, it'd be reasonable to expect that some of our transmissions would be carrier waves overlaid with completely-random data. The periodic components of those signals would be consistently inconsistent, meaning there would never be a stable repetition in the signal. Even though that's completely the opposite of how an unencrypted AM radio signal would appear, the data analysis would be the same. It's just a matter of looking for a spike that points down rather than up on a particular chart.

Sure, because at the same time that unemployment is so low, the barriers to getting a new job are still getting higher.

All you have to do is have 10 years experience in these 35 technologies and skills, half of which were only developed 7 years ago. You also must be willing to move across the country (without a relocation package) to be in "proximity" to your working team, even though 95% of the time you'll be working from your home office, which must be presentable for video calls 24/7, and for these calls you must be in a tailored suit. Your job will consist of moving money from the wealthy to the super-wealthy, and for this entry-level position you will be paid a salary approximately $6 above the poverty line. All vacations (up to 2 weeks per calendar year with 6 months notice and 7 managers' approvals, and no rolling over time to next year) are unpaid.

Don't like this? Clearly you're just unqualified to do the job, and we'll replace you with a H1-B worker who is essentially held hostage to the company, and will be sent back to whatever hole they were pulled from should they show any sign of disloyalty, attempting to start a stable life in America, or (worst of all) expecting to be treated like an actual human.

If you are willing to meet all those job requirements, just fill out this online application using your personal computer (application website compatible with IE6 only), then submit a PDF version of your professionally-assembled resume, which will be promptly ignored by a bigoted AI, and if you're lucky you'll get a denial in 6-12 months.

I might be exaggerating just slightly, but that's not too far from the current state of job-seeking.

In a free society, every organization relies on having good relationships with their suppliers and customers. That's one of the long-reaching implications of the right to free association, and is also the basis for the "corporations are like people" concept in that they can choose to enter a contract, or not.

Twitter chose to exercise their freedom to not associate with WikiLeaks (a choice now reversed). That's how business works. Of course goodwill is the currency of vermin of all kinds, along with everyone else living in a free society. To force someone to engage in business against their will is tyranny.

I'm not suggesting they are, or should be... but they're certainly trying. They're a private company, and they have every right to control what they publish.

Similarly, WikiLeaks is a private organization, and has every right to host their own site, and publish whatever distorted version of the truth they feel like*, and I'll gladly support them for that as I do Twitter.

* I should rant here about the importance of network neutrality as it applies to AS connection peering, because at some point there does need to be an enforcement of free speech for the term to have any useful meaning... but so far, basic competition has done the job to only minimal levels of disaster.

WikiLeaks is an organization that is quite willing to be a propaganda mouthpiece. Twitter has made efforts before to remove such propaganda from its platform, so this should come as no surprise.

At the same time, WikiLeaks is an organization that thrives on the image of being oppressed. If their account were locked at any time, I expect they'd find something to highlight, and claim they're the victims of some grand conspiracy.

Perhaps I'm just too cynical, but I've seen WikiLeaks execute some impressive acrobatics in morality to justify what they do. I'm not surprised they find themselves running short of good will.

Even before the Senator said his name, his lawyers received death threats. I'm sure that everyone's being nice and civil now that his name is out.