Well, I'll have to admit, I didn't have "learning that someone on Slashdot believes that the Cold War was a myth" on my bingo card for today.

You seem to be confusing "wanting to get rid of communists" with "wanting their countries to be poor and dangerous".

I don't disagree.

But other than being vocal about it...what recourse is there? Trump does not recognize shame, nor admit wrongdoing in any context, so it's not like he'll ever change his behavior. So what forcing mechanisms are there?
* He's not up for re-election, and so there's no accountability there.
* Congress could try to do something via legislation (e.g., require Presidential divestment into blind trusts), but 1) you'd need a veto-proof majority, which just ain't happening, and 2) would get tied up in the courts longer than Trump's remaining time in office.
* Judicial relief is off the table. SCOTUS has made it clear that bribing for a pardon is totally A-OK, because you can't ever second guess a President's core powers.
* You could try to modify or curtail the pardon power, but that would require a constitutional amendment (2/3 of Congress, plus 3/4 of all States), which also ain't gonna happen.
* And that leaves impeachment in the House (simple majority), with trial and removal in the Senate (2/3 vote), which we also all know ain't gonna happen.

I get the sarcasm, but due to wave-particle duality, it isn't entirely incorrect to say that X- and gamma-ray photons are "tiny" compared to visible light or radio. Certainly their wavelength is much, much shorter. Consequently they can be localized to a much smaller volume of space (i.e., the "wave packet" has small spatial extent).

True, although there was a substantial, exponentially-growing market for silicon wafers, which could justify the R&D cost and capital expenditures for that kind of refinement and scale-up from niche to high-volume maturity. Here, there is certainly demand for CZT, and more demand would exist if you could bring down the cost. But is there enough demand out there to justify, say, a $100M investment?

Can someone explain what's the difference between trading "tokenized" stocks, and just ordinary trading stocks? Why would I want to buy/sell a token that represents a share of a company, compared to actually buying and selling shares? Who receives the dividends? When you sell a token at a gain/loss, how do you document that in your taxes? Does DTCC report the gain/loss to the IRS? (Or do neither DTCC or the taxpayer report, in which case the SEC has just given the green light for massive tax fraud?) Who retains the shares' voting rights in this scenario?

Sure thing bub.

Rivians main plant is in Illinois and it is more likely they would test the vehicles there not in California.

USAID was horrifically corrupt

The cuts to USAID are projected to cause 14 million extra deaths - a large minority of those children - by 2030. And USAID engendered massive goodwill among its recipients

But no, by all means kill a couple million people per year and worsen living conditions (creating more migration) in order to save $23 per person, that's clearly Very Smart(TM).

And I don't know how to inform you of this, but the year is now 2025 and the Cold War and the politics therein ended nearly four decades ago. And USAID was not created "to smuggle CIA officers" (though CIA offers used every means available to them to do their work, certainly), it was created as a counterbalance to the USSR's use of similar soft power to turn the Third World to *its* side.

They can go back at any point if they don't think the conditions and salaries offered are worth the job. What matters is that they remain free to leave, with no "catches" keeping them there (inability to get return transport, inability to communicate with the outside world, misinformation, etc etc). Again, there's a debate to have over what conditions should be mandated by regulation, but the key point is that the salary offered - like happens illegally today en masse - is lower than US standards but higher than what they can get at home.

What on Earth are you talking about? Nobody is trying to make other countries poor and dangerous. People come to the US from these countries because even jobs that are tough and underpaid by US standards are vastly better than what is available at home. Creating a formal system just eliminates the worst aspects of it: the lawlessness, the sneaking across the border in often dangerous conditions (swimming across rivers, traveling through deserts), "coyotes" smuggling people in terrible conditions, and so forth. The current US system is the dumbest way you could possibly handle it: people wanting to work, US employers wanting them, the US economy benefitting from it... but still making it illegal, chaotic, dangerous, and unregulated for those involved.

No country can afford to take in unlimited refugees. At some point, the answer becomes another question. "How to we raise the standard of living for people in that country because we can not afford to take any more of them here?"

LK

Also, point of note: it's unlikely you'd actually grow plants and humans in interconnected habitats anyway. You might pump some gases from one to the next, but: agriculture takes up lots of area / volume. If you're talking Mars rather than Venus, then you're talking large pressure vessels, which is a lot of mass, proportional to the pressure differential. Which is expensive. But plants tolerate living at much lower pressures than humans (and there's potential to engineer / breed them to tolerate even lower - the main problems are that they mistake low pressure for drought, and that's a response we can manipulate). So it makes much more sense to grow them in large, low-pressure structures with a mostly-CO2 / some O2 / no N2 atmosphere, rather than at human-comfortable pressure levels.

That said, you don't want human workers having to work in pressure suits, so ideally you'd use a sliding tray system (we use them on Earth to save space in greenhouses) or similar, except that you'd move the plants through an airlock into a human-comfortable area for any non-mechanized work. Obviously, mechanized systems can operate at any pressure level, and also obviously, some work would still need to be done in pressure suits every now and again (maintenance, cleaning, etc).

None of this applies to a floating Venus habitat, where in your typical Landis design your crew - and potentially agriculture - are just living in your lifting envelope, at normal pressures. The envelope is massive, so you have no shortage of space for agriculture, all well-illuminated from all angles if the envelope is transparent. The challenges there are different - how to support them, humidity management, water supply, falling debris, etc.

If only the US had some sort of aid program designed to try to make conditions more favourable in the sort of countries that economic migrants tend to flee from. Maybe the US could call it "US Aid" or something, and give it a decent budget rather than gutting it to save $23 per American.

But the main issue is that the proper solution is obviously to have a formal, controlled, actually viable work visa system for economic migrants, distinct from asylum. The US economy is immensely boosted by millions of (generally awful) jobs being done by illegal immigrants at substandard wages (which are still vastly more than they could get at home), making US goods far more competitive than they would otherwise be and pumping huge sums of money into the economy. Formalize it. Basic worker protections but not the minimum wages or benefits that citizens get. You drop off an application for a sponsoring company, and so long as you're employed with them and not causing problems, you can stay. Fired, laid off, or quit, and you go back to your country (where you can reapply for a different job). You can also promote maquiladoras, wherein immigrants are also working for your companies, but the labour is being done across the border (but the goods move freely without tariffs, so it's like having the work done in your country).

(I find it hilarious hearing people like Vance talking about how he'll bring housing costs down by kicking out immigrants, freeing up housing. Um, dude, exactly who do you think it is that builds the housing in much of the US?)

"Refugee papers" OMG I'm dying here...