I know, I do it on Android as well. Even before that my old Nokia feature phone could do it.

I wasn't suggesting it as a new feature, I was suggesting it as a course of action already available to most phone users. Same with laptops, create an imagine, sent it encrypted over the net and do a full wipe before crossing borders.

Destroying something that the authorities have expressed an interest in is a crime in many jurisdictions.

A better option is to simply back up your phone before you cross the border. Encrypt the backup and store it somewhere other than on your person, e.g. cloud storage or your own server somewhere. Then wipe the phone. You can now hand it over to the border agent to datarape and he won't get anything.

In France, the UK and Germany, as well as in Japan and the US, and China, insurance is heavily subsidised too. No insurer will offer insurance to a nuclear plant because the potential liability is in the hundreds of billions of Euros range, if not more should the absolute worst happen. It's always been that, so the government provides unlimited liability insurance for free.

It's not just politics that keeps old nuclear plants running, it's capitalism. The owners don't want to close a revenue generating plant that will cost tens of billions of replace, and deal with cleaning up the site. They will only close a plant when either something breaks and it costs too much to fix or they are forced to by the regulator.

Nuclear plants need an expiration date on them, and strong legal enforcement of it.

Right, and when it comes to power generation deaths are the only metric that matters.

They used to do that in the UK as well. It was supposed to make people living near the plant, people like you, feel safer and that the plant posed no danger to them.

They had to stop because the plant kept leaking dangerous material into the surrounding environment. Most of the problems were due to accidents when handling waste or moving things around, occasionally things like cracked containers. There were some fines but nothing much done about it, they pretty much just shrugged and closed off the paths in the affected areas. No, really.

False dichotomy. The choice is not nuclear or coal. There are many other sources of energy that are less dangerous than both.

Which other energy sources? Coal, sure. Gas, yep. Wind, solar PV, solar thermal, wave, tidal, geothermal, biofuel?

Actually scratch that. Imagine if Russia was tapping and recording every single phone call and sharing that data with China, North Korea, Iran and a few other "partner" states. Imagine you found out that while there was some security related use of the data, mostly it was just used for economic and political reasons, like making sure US companies didn't get big contracts that Chinese ones were bidding for. Would you be surprised?

What they are doing can't really be described as "spying" in the traditional sense of targeting specific individuals and lines of communication. They are doing a "full take", that is capturing everything that anyone in those countries does. Not just metadata, the content as well. Everything, indiscriminately.

Imagine if Russia was tapping every single phone call made in the US. Would you consider that type of "spying" surprising? That's basically what is happening here, only much much worse.

So you would be fine with your personal medical records being published just to satisfy this rule? Most doctors probably would, which is why they don't require it when considering medical papers for publication in respected journals.

Incorrect. Sometimes it is not possible to reproduce results in any meaningful way, but it is still considered science. For example, how could you reproduce the results of climate change? Build another earth and wait a few hundred/thousand/million/billion years for the result? There are many other areas, such as medicine, social sciences and theoretical physics where reproducing results is simply impossible (e.g. you can't make people younger and cancer free, then reproduce their exact lifestyle for 30 years to see if cigarettes gave them cancer).

That's the reason why the Republicans want this. They can defeat any science they don't like by simply claiming that it can't be reproduced, and prevent the EPA using it to make rulings. It's specifically targeted at the EPA, which deals with environmental and health issues that are often hard to prove beyond any reasonable doubt in the first place, without the extra requirement of having to poison people just to see if they get sick again or if it was some unrelated illness.