Schneier's allegations require that you believe a known non-trustworthy person (Edward Snowden)'s own allegation for that to be true.

When all of that can be brought to bear in a US court with Snowden et al in custody, then you can start talking about it as truth when it is proven to be truth.

A lot of that departure was driven by the political climate in the 1980s, which was to exact vengance on those industries and their supporters. The finishing blow came when the opposition encouraged non-assimilating immigrants to flood in. To a limited extent, that's playing out in current-day United States, except through various actions.

What Thatcher (and the financial interests she enabled) couldn't kill, the opposition managed to finish off through importation of non-assimilating individuals from the Third World.

If the Terminator comes from the future, let's be realistic! He'll show up with lots of bloatware. Not only will ke kill you, he'd go through your social media accounts to track down and kill everyone on Facebook that you ever went to high school with. He'd also check your mail, handle phone calls, self-install software updates from the future, keep track of your bank account, play second-person-shooter video games, autoplay video advertisements, and sound cool alarm tones to remind you of your impending appointment with death.

Only if you don't like the benefits coming from economies of scale. Those disappear even in the ACA.

You can enjoy your second-tier care with an small employer while I'll enjoy less sacrifice with a direct-hire/non-contractor employer that can use economies of scale to provide more benefits per dollar.

Never mind that you are operating in a high-failure part of the private sector with people that cannot really afford to fail. That, and you have no scale to offset purchase costs, especially those relating to benefits.

There, simplified it for you. Even quantum tunneling can't penetrate the barrier of a thick skull.

You should think that through a little more. Extraterrestrials might breed like spiders where the males get cannibalized after mating. Can you imagine "To Catch a Predator" on another planet?

CHRIS HANSEN: Tonight, we're waiting for NudeSpiderMan as he crawls up... he thinks he's just here for sex. Little does he know that he's about to get trapped in our web.
NudeSpiderMan: Hi, are you "Charolette"?
DECOY: Wow, you look cute! Hold on while I finish spinning this orb around the lunch I just caught for us!
NudeSpiderMan: Sure babe, take your time...
CHRIS HANSEN: Hi! How are you doin'?
NudeSpiderMan: Oh no! All the way here I wanted to turn around! I knew I was being stupid!
CHRIS HANSEN: well, NudeSpiderMan, I don't understand. You knew she was going to rip your head off, but you came here anyway...?
NudeSpiderMan: Yeah, yeah... sigh... I knew I was stupid... I kept telling myself to turn around... Now I'm losing everything!
DECOY: Oooh, yeah! SWIPE *munch* *munch*
NudeSpiderMan: Chris? Chris? Are you OK? Oh no... she went for him instead... I'm such a loser!
DECOY: You know, I might want seconds!
NudeSpiderMan: Well babe, I still want to stick my head in your mouth, even if I'm not your first...

That's part of the "Check a few boxes and ship a translated owner's manual" treatment of the Western markets. Second to that is the over-regulation by environmental groups that operate by the "small cars for thee, but not for me" philosophy.

Making corner-cutting, granola-eating-environmentalist pleasing 4-cylinder-based cars is not the primary specialty of General Motors - especially when you see that most of them are captive imports(Spark/Aveo, Cruze, about anything Buick). The only saving grace is that GM doesn't opt to make cylinders appear through thin air (a la Ford's EcoBoost). Let GM make the larger vehicles for less, which is their specialty, and they will do well.

Personally, I'd not mind if GM decided to make Buick solely a Chinese brand, and then bring in Oldsmobile in their traditional positioning to cover the void in the US. Then find a creative way to (effectively) offer more car than what EPA's CAFE regulations would allow - perhaps by allowing US-spec imports of 4-cylinder cars to be placed on order but not generally stocked. If one were to go beyond that, lobby to have the EPA's regulations removed or curtailed.

It also indicates the further wish to be out of touch with Western markets and continue to decline in overall quality. Checking a few boxes and translating the manual makes for a bad execution on implementing a product in other markets - as opposed to integrating the expectations made by the target market.

Besides, having it in Los Angeles doesn't diminish the value of Eastern contributions, but serves as a barrier to entry for the unqualified.

China and their fellow freedom-reducing brethren operate on the idea of stealing from nations that innovate. A proven secondary use for that is for them to use it against their own citizens.

The US and the rest of the civilized world operate on the idea of creating something new or advancing existing technology in a new way. Unlike China, there has been no solid evidence to prove use against citizens - just the allegations of a spurned traitor(who in turn gave what he had to China and Russia, of all irony).

I dimly recall that method too but IIRC the array couldn't be saved to tape- you needed POKE statements underneath the DIM. There was also another method involving adjusting the SP register to lower the top of the stack and claiming a few kilobytes of RAM for whatever purpose- but that approach had the same problem with not getting saved to tape.

I remember I had a yellow book that was for kids learning assembler, and it had a cartoon CPU with registers for hands and feet. I can't remember the title- I just pulled the ZX81 out of the closet to look for it, but it isn't in the box anymore. I still have the 16K pack and the awful little ZX Printer that sparked onto rolls of aluminum thermal paper.

So entitlement mentality (in this case, an arrogant disregard for the residents around you) is OK if you have a measure of success, but not if you don't?

Yes, it was obviously a very shitty system, since they were selling them thirty years ago for about $99. It was like a 1980s version of a Raspberry Pi. But it did have a Z80 in there and that's how I learned assembly when I was a kid; I just dug to it through all the crap it was soldered to.