So now we know why Charlie Gordon didn't stay smart - he was too old.

No mandatory door locks before 9/11.

Several years before 9/11, pilots were asking that the cockpits be made more secure by installing a $200 lock on the pilot's side of the door giving access to the cockpit. Airlines complained that it would be too expensive. So, thanks to the airlines being too cheap to do something that made sense, more than 3,000 people died, and we now have the TSA going where no man has gone before.

A parent beating their kids is probably not going to be sending photos or texts bragging about what they did. The same for most cases of sexual assault by parents or relatives. And there's a heck of a lot more abuse by parents and relatives than by child pornographers.

Putting money into raising the standard of living reduces the stresses on parents who are trying to make ends meet and just run out of patience one day and take it out on the kids. Same with equal access to employment so there's no more gender inequality on the job, so that women can more easily leave a bad situation with the kids. Kids who feel more secure, who don't run away from home to escape being abused, are less likely to fall for predators.

Similarly, by reducing the level of domestic violence, kids don't learn by example that it's "okay" for an adult to abuse either another adult or them, so their sense of "this isn't right" when someone else tries to do something to them remains intact, and they're more likely to treat that adult as an anomaly, and seek the help of other adults who they feel they can trust (teachers, neighbors, their parents, a store clerk, even total strangers just passing by on the street), rather than treat all adults as a possible source of abuse.

Additionally, we could work to remove the stigma of depression, so that adults caught in such scenarios can have enough self-actualization to seek help.

Doing more of this would "save more kids" by removing the scenarios that put many of them in harms way in the first place and by making help more accessible. And it will be cheaper, and not involve depriving everyone of their rights.

Ain't gonna happen, though, because politicians like "big and shiny." Why? Because it's easier to point to "we're doing something about it", with yet another big program, than to explain to voters that putting more money into social services, education, and mental health isn't seen as "yet another slide down the road to a nanny state." For some reason, they prefer Big Brother.

There's worse, if you google "lake mead drying up."

There's water in those iceballs known as comets.

H2O + energy is the big stumbling block. Solve that, and everything else can work with enough will and resources.

They already do, by proxy. They have the economic clout to have better access to members of both the house and senate than the constituents they are supposed to represent, and thus can lobby for things that are beneficial to them as opposed to the general public.

Well, the feds did manage to put a man on the moon in under a decade, when the technology didn't exist. One of the spin-offs of that project led to the computers we take for granted today.

And they did this while waging a proxy war with the Soviets in Asia, and not having the whole mess devolve into MAD, which was a real risk at the time.

A lot of the problems with the health care system can be laid at the feet of lobbyists.