In particular, I don't know if the Democratically-controlled Senate really wants to create an opening for Republicans to go after their wounded and weakened Democratic White House.

Who knows, maybe the President will come out and say that Senator Feinstein and her congressional staff are connected to foreign terrorists and thus a legitimate intelligence target. Why else would he continue to stand up for Director Brennan? Even in the political cynic in me is surprised that the White House didn't sacrifice him just to make the attention go away.

What gets me about this story isn't that they sold their children... you're going to have one or two parents out there in any society that are so screwed up in their heads that they'd contemplate such an option to fund whatever addiction they may have. The significance is that it's so easy to do so in China.

No, they would freak out because where do you think the survivors in that massive neighboring country are going to go? Also, what nation would want their immediate neighbor to be covered in nuclear fallout that may just blow your way...

Lot of people are dismissing this, but I think there is sound logic to what they're saying for two reasons. One, by becoming a purely focused battery manufacturer, Musk becomes platform agnostic and will have a much better chance of licensing his tech and selling his batteries to all auto manufacturers. This could benefit the broader electric vehicle industry as the technology is now available to dozens of well established manufacturers who can produce vehicles on multiple orders of magnitude greater than Tesla could possibly reach in a decade or more. If they do it right, they could make a huge amount of money this route, dominating a key control point in the electric vehicle.

The second thing is that they will continue to be highly constrained in their manufacturing capabilities for a while. I love Tesla and would love to own one of their vehicles, but the company's production system will take at least a decade or two to even get anywhere close to the order of magnitude that more mainstream auto manufacturers are able to make. This may not matter much if you want your Tesla to be unique, but if your goal is to see the mass deployment of electric vehicles in the near future, organically scaling up Tesla may not necessarily be the way to go.

All that being said, I HIGHLY doubt Musk will go in this direction. His MO at other companies has always been platform oriented with tight vertical integration, and I don't see that changing anytime in the near future, not with him at the helm.

I think you make a good point. I do believe there is a welder shortage, but it's for niche or highly experienced areas. Companies allowed the pipeline to dry up, and now they are paying the price and scrambling to make up for years of neglect. Don't think you can make a H1B crisis as easily with welding however: people may be confused or intimidated by what advanced scientific and programming fields do, but welding is one that tends to fall more neatly into traditional territory of organized labor. They may be weakened, but they can fight tooth and nail on that one.

That's a silly statement. They're government bureaucrats. At least in the United States, you never join the bureaucracy if your goal is to make money. Even contracting for the government, while better paying than direct government employment, still pales compared to more lucrative areas of the economy, especially for the skill sets we're talking about.

I'm REALLY curious as to what they expect to replace the coal mining business with in the middle of rural West Virginia. Even assuming you could retrain all those workers, that simply leaves an entire army of now skilled workers sitting in towns that have had their economy completely decimated by the elimination of coal. One doesn't simply regenerate a brand new, magic economy there from scratch. Even something as basic as building a new factory, say a solar panel factory, would require not just the cost of building the factory, but the infrastructure to support said factory (roads, water, power, rail links, etc.), and $50B is not going to cover the cost of doing that for 87,000 workers.

Yes, just in case you haven't been following all the coverage from the last three or four days, the United States has been providing a large amount of satellite data, even leveraging their missile launch detection system to search for possible explosions. The more interesting question is why it took the Chinese this long to provide satellite imagery to search for a plane full of primarily their own citizenry in its own region.

This program is probably focused on members of the bureaucracy, but I wonder if they're going to cover another very significant group of government officials with security clearances: Members of Congress and their staffs. A lot of your leaks happen over on Capitol Hill after all. Then again, I'm going to take a guess that they will very vocally and aggressively oppose this action and play the separation of powers card to shield themselves from this new effort.

The Financial Times [Paywall] is reporting that a highly sophisticated cyberweapon known as Ouroboros is being used to infect, monitor and potentially attack Ukrainian computer networks including government systems. Forensics mark it as being Russian developed, and the article compares it to Stuxnet in terms of sophistication and capability (though it is not related to that specific software). Websites are small potatoes, nothing more than spray paint on a wall. This appears to be more more like explosives, designed to take out targeted infrastructure.