Did they implement those systems in a few months? Or did it take more planning?

Check out the municipal election in Paterson this year, which invalidated or lost so many votes (19%) that it is being re-run.
Trump claims fraud but indeed that's falsely jumping to a conclusion. However we do know enough is amiss that there would be little confidence in a close (1-2%) election. NPR's fact-check countered that it means the checks are working, but a signature check invalidation means either:
* attempted fraud is common (something Trump is worried about but Dems say never happens), or
* lots of people, especially new voters, are being disenfranchised (something Dems worry about but Republicans downplay)

Mail-in voting can work, and CA and 3/4 states you list have gotten those systems to work over time. But they aren't swing states trying to do this in a few months during a pandemic. A.G. Barr is right, we are playing with fire. I live in CA and use mail-in ballots but always hand-deliver it to a polling station, due to potential for lost/last ballots, so this is not a worry I just invented.

If you want to look further back, see what the NY Times said in 2012. Any additional source of inaccuracy is bad, regardless of intent, and undermines trust in our elections.

If you are old enough you'll remember the fight of electronic voting. Those systems "can work" too, but it was an unnecessary risk and one reason I fought against it. Back then it was Dems fighting to stop those systems and Republicans trying to downplay issues. Now we've got a complete 180.

Finally, Joe Biden said he would listen to the scientists. The scientists are saying that voting in person can be safe with normal covid precautions. The few people with high risk can use the existing absentee-system (without scaling it 20x). Similarly, has there been a huge covid spike in any of the protest hotspots? It seems not, so it should be safe for a 1-day vote for 90% of adults. Leave the mail-in resources for those who really need it.

I have always voted 3rd party so I'm used to losing, but would like to see a definitive result and avoid mass protests, regardless of the color of headwear the protesters are wearing.

I think they will stick to a specific ARM ISA and look down on anyone adopting any future changes. In time, they will be known as the Armish.

It might not be likely, and I doubt the timeline, but it also wouldn't be entirely surprising by May. Antibodies for C19 fade relatively quickly. T-cell immunity (which unfortunately is much harder to test for) does not, and there seem to be a lot of such individuals:
    https://news.ki.se/immunity-to...
Some places and sub-populations may be a lot closer to herd immunity, or at least close enough that standard measures drop the R0 below 1.

Of course many places are not yet exposed to that level, and the stuff above is possible but not confirmed in US populations, so we should still take reasonable measures to slow the spread.

No, Fauci (and the S-Gen, CDC) admitted that only recently. At the time they said regular people don't need to wear masks. Smart people of course surmised he was just saying that due to the shortage, given the mask-wearing policies in Asia seemed to be working. I wish they'd treated us like adults then and explained the tradeoff, but most of the legislative and executive branch have been acting like children for years, so I'm not sure we could expect better.
Timeline from Jan-April: https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/01...

It's very hard to close the border to US citizens. Might not be constitutional in fact. Flights from China on the west coast were instituting 14-day stay-at-home quarantines, though admittedly we were not enforcing with police. In other words, we collectively did do as close to the correct response on that part as is feasible in a free-ish society. We have no authority to close inter-state borders, and NYC would probably lose if sued (early in the pandemic, NYC flipped out when told they might be quarantined -- most of the US now has the NYC/Italian strain).

Americans don't like following rules, and it's not just Republicans.

I'm in a very progressive CA city, if you polled people probably 90% would say masks are essential, but walking on the sidewalk and passing each other only about 25% (mostly asian and/or elderly) seem to be wearing masks. Uptake in stores is good here at least, but then there's this:
    https://www.sfchronicle.com/ba...
People don't wear masks around small friend groups because they "know them". This is SF, with zero political mask pushback -- so nationally we don't have a chance.

I think they are talking more about the parental lock and a parent setting it to 65mph, for example.

112 should be enough for nearly anything, and the vast majority of drivers would be more of a liability at that speed than anything it might help. Even in the case of someone trying to chase you down to harm you, look at how police car chases tend to turn out bad for the driver being chased.

A GoFundMe would be more appropriate in this case.

For Kickstarter, they should get an undergraduate design student to make a video documenting the future of all workplaces and jobs and how Kickstarter can revolutionize it. Then we'd all fund it based on that completely impractical vision. After a few years of increasingly sparse updates, they'd eventually blog that it "just didn't work due to the toxicity of online non-believers" and go into hiding.

From wikipedia:

Which the article buried in a single sentence in the middle of the article:

What they chose to focus the headline and a good portion of the article on instead:

He may be as dumb as bricks, but they didn't hire him because he was a dog breeder. This is just as disingenuous as saying Democrats appointed a bartender to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (AOC). Obviously her job as bartender is not why she's there.

The GP will probably only see "Harrison is a dog breeder" as wrong, and you will only see "AOC is a bartender" as wrong. If you'd both take the blinders off, you'd see neither statement is in good faith.

I live in California near an international airport. Quarantine was being recommended, as I know someone who came on a flight from China around then. That recommendation became official two days later:
    https://www.dhs.gov/news/2020/...
So, your statement was right for 2 days and wrong 2 months.

Generally countries don't want to block their own citizens from returning home, as that legally gets tricky (visas expire, there are constitutional rights, etc).

The whole response could have been better, but I think the US would have been caught flat-footed with any recent president. It's not like most countries are knocking it out of the park -- only a few did really well, and all of those used travel ban as one of their measures. Various US states and cities have shown different trajectories so far, and all share the same federal government. While central coordination should be better, no state is so small and helpless it can't look to other states to see what works, and copy it.

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/health-coronavirus-usa-cost/

I don't think most countries are at the optimal place in the tradeoff, but to pretend there is no tradeoff whatsoever (as many in the media are doing) is exceedingly naive.

One of the researchers in that article estimated that 20% unemployment could cause 48 million years of life lost. The US life expectancy is ~80 and the mean Covid-19 death is ~60, so each covid death is ~20 years of life lost. So the 48 million years would correspond to 2.4 million Covid-19 deaths. Now of course these are all projections from models and you can question that researcher's assumptions and methods. There's a real discussion to be had though.

South Korea still has social-distancing and stay-at-home directives. They are doing great at limiting cases, but there is still a cost and they aren't out of the woods (2nd waves are possible anywhere).

They'll probably be able to lift limites earlier than other nations, so there is still an economic benefit, in addition to the human one. However you can't call life there normal by any stretch.

The state-of-the-art AI camouflage shirt is available here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002HJ377A.

I sense a follower of Isaac.

France built 56 reactors in 15 years starting in the mid-1970s under the Messmer Plan.

If the world engaged on a project like that, based on population:
    goal=157.5e15 Wh/year (total world energy usage; try to keep it flat through efficiency)
    pop=7.53e9
    rate=379.1e12/53.73e6/15 (Wh/year / person-year)
    years=goal/(rate*pop) --> ~45 years

Based on GDP:
    france_1970gdp=981.294e9 (France 1970 GDP in 2019 dollars)
    world_gdp=80.684e12 (current)
    rate=379.1e12/france_1970gdp/15
    years=goal/(rate*world_gdp) --> ~76 years

This is assuming no improvements in design or economies of scale. Yes it takes too long and costs too much to build reactors now, but France demonstrated that could be overcome with the right policy.

Another way to compare practicality is how much we'd need to scale over what we have.
    total = 157.5e15 Wh
    hydro = 4036e12 Wh (most good sources already tapped)
    renewable = 1854e12 Wh (renewable without hydro or wood-burning)
    nuclear = 2487e12 Wh

    needed = total - hydro - renewable - nuclear
    needed/nuclear -> 62x
    needed/renewable -> 80x
    (needed+nuclear)/renewable -> 82x (anti-nuke case)

Is 62x practical? Maybe not, but let's not pretend 82x (US Green New Deal and similar approaches) is practical either. The best plan would probably scale up all of our non-carbon sources. Yes, nuclear waste will be a problem, as will be rare earth mining and land usage for renewables. However compared to the land lost to sea level rise, this is a drop in the bucket and we need to get our priorities right for the next century's reality. Of course we should continue research into fusion and solar+batteries from abundant materials, and if one comes through in time we'll limit the damage done.

The author of the Green New Deal said "...the world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change"
https://www.realclearpolitics....

At least you admit it's hyperbole, but we're not lying about it, and it doesn't help the cause.

He didn't say what you claim. 70% of ALL people will be in the top 20% at SOME point. Not 70% of the BOTTOM 20%, like you claim. I doubt 70% 20th-to-80th mobility exists anywhere in the world (feel free to drop a reference to correct me), except perhaps in collapsed states where all are poor.

The American dream used to be that you could get enough to live somewhere nice enough that your KIDS can do anything, and that still exists as immigrants demonstrate over and over. You get from bottom to ~50%, and from there your kids can get into the comfortable upper tiers if they take advantage of the opportunities given to them. Now it seems people lack this patience; yes it's hard to go from factory worker to CEO in one lifetime.

If you define the top as 1% or 5%, statistically speaking this is almost necessary (for lifetime earnings it's mathematically necessary, for any-one-year it's more plausible but still people don't cycle *that* much you mostly just grow over your career).

Another way to look at it as where did the 1% come from in the previous generation? That gives you an idea of if it is possible, in particular if you put in top-10% effort, rather than is it "likely" when not controlling for motivation or anything else.

I had a neighbor with a beautiful red corvette in perfect condition. I bet a lot of folks seeing that would think had an "unfair" excess of cash. In reality he walked 2 miles to work every weekday (w/ a 500 foot elevation change), and only drove his one car on the weekend. His house was also a relatively small A-frame with 1 bedroom and 1 loft. Instead of being rich he had just prioritized what mattered and lived well within his means.

I now live alongside people who made 2-3x his salary and think they are poor victims of the evil rich. While these views contain some kernel of truth (power & corruption certainly exists), they miss much of the picture and in particular optimizing what you do control.