What they ought to do, IMHO, is delete the bankruptcy exemption from student loans. If your financial circumstances are so bad you never have a realistic prospect of paying off the loans, that's what the bankruptcy code is for, except student loans are neigh impossible to discharge in bankruptcy. It's actually easier to stiff the IRS and include your tax debt in a bankruptcy than it is to get rid of student loans.

The bankruptcy code has provisions to prevent abuse, you aren't going to be able to discharge all of your debts if you're a Doctor pulling six figures, but a single Mom saddled with loans she'll never realistically repay even if she makes payments her entire life? If it was literally any other debt, she could wipe it out with a bankruptcy filing.

You're not wrong about the Ivy League but you're also kind of glossing over the fact that public college costs have likewise soared at many times inflation for decades. There are a lot of reasons why this happened, it's not exclusively because the Government decided to throw nearly unlimited amounts of money at the system via student loans, but that definitely played a significant role in it.

If you really want to go down this rabbit hole, you should also ask why American society has spent the last several decades pushing a "college for all" mantra, building a society where you can't be financially successful without a degree, when more than half of the population does not have a degree. You can point to more socialized countries where university is essentially free, from the student's perspective, and their graduation rates are not appreciably better than ours. A key difference is most of them have vocational programs so the 50-60% of society that doesn't go onto university retain a viable economic path.

Have you actually worked with the Microsoft and Google cloud ecosystems? I have. In terms of security, compliance, monitoring, Microsoft is way ahead of Google, and that's before you consider Google's proclivity for axing services on short notice that you've come to rely on. There's a reason why very few serious businesses entertain the Google Cloud. Outside of academia and small/niche businesses, it's nearly non-existent.

You don't have to like Microsoft, they certainly do a lot that pisses me off, but you should ground your criticisms in reality instead of going for first post karma whoring.

My supposition is the younger generations have different expectations of what healthcare should offer than the Greatest Generation that lived through the Great Depression and a whole-of-society war mobilization. I don't know any one from the WW2 generation that is unhappy with the VA. Conversely, I don't know anyone from Vietnam onwards that is wholly happy with the VA. The "better than nothing" faint praise I hear seems to be typical, at least amongst the vets I know. The mental healthcare (more accurately, near complete lack of it) is a huge problem and if I were to speculate some more, not something as keenly felt by the WW2-era vets, because they weren't encouraged to seek treatment for mental trauma as later generations were.

She's my partner because neither one of us wants to get married and 'girl/boyfriend' seems like an insignificant descriptor for someone you share a household with.

The US system needs day fines.

Is a systemd developer seriously throwing shade at another piece of software for having a large attack surface?!

I had a friend of that generation too, he just passed away this year at the ripe old age of 99, and he had nothing but good things to say about the VA.

Conversely, my partner, and her brother, both US Navy vets in their 40s, they have mixed things to say about it. They both would agree that it's "better than nothing", they both say it has provided a great safety net for them and allowed them forgo caring about health insurance when looking for jobs, yet neither is fully satisfied with it. When it comes to primary care, preventative medicine, things like that, the VA is great, more or less the equal of what I get with my platinum plated private insurance. When it comes to speciality medicine, it's hit or miss. The wait lists are the worst part, it takes her weeks to months to get an appointment with her regular care team, diagnostic tests, etc.

My beefs with the VA, as someone who has loved ones in the system: It's absolute garbage at dealing with mental health, which you'd think would be a major focus for a health organization that is supposed to be treating veterans. I have never gone to the VA ER and not seen multiple patients with major and apparently untreated mental illnesses in the waiting room. My partner had to resort to self-paying private practitioners to come to terms with her mental health damage from combat deployments, because the VA was useless in this regard. If you aren't suicidal and/or easily treatable with meds, they got nothing to offer you but wait lists and bureaucracy that would make the worst HMO look like concierge medicine.

That brings me to my second beef with the VA, it has no equivalent of Urgent Care, at least in the major metros we've called home, as well as those we've been unlucky enough to be traveling through when my partner had a health scare. You either get an appointment with your regular care team -- which will probably take weeks to months -- or you go to the ER. None of the scares my partner has had in the four years we've been together have been "ER worthy", when the equivalents happen to me I go to Urgent Care, but she has to go to the ER. Not only is this stupidly expensive (shouldn't the VA want to save money where it can?) but it invariably leads to insane wait times. Something I could get knocked out in an hour or two at any Urgent Care Center is probably going to entail six plus hours at the VA ER.

I should also add "They have too many Dr. Feelgoods" working for them. My partner was on an opioid cocktail from the VA to manage service related injuries. It took her years to wean off those drugs, against the advice of her VA care team. Now she manages with weed and the occasional NSAID, so did she really need to be on opioids? They gave her zero help weaning off them, in fact, they tried to discourage her from doing so. They still throw major controlled substances (ambien is my favorite) at her like they're candy. If there's a Schedule II or III drug you'd like to get, just sign up for the VA, you'll find a provider willing to write you a script in short order.

The barcode on a passport card simply has the ID #, which is useless to anyone who does not have access to State Department databases. I've never seen a POS accept the barcode, although they always try it first, because the POS is looking for the driver's license barcode, which has EVERYTHING. Name, DOB, address, height, weight, if it's printed on the front of your driver's license, it's contained within that barcode.

POS could use the machine readable section on a passport card (or a real passport), if they were so inclined, like the airlines do with real passports, but I've never seen a POS set up for that. The Passport Card is a decent enough lifehack to keep your PII confidential for mundane transactions like buying beer.

That's exactly how fake IDs work now. We have a 19 year old niece. She bought her fake ID off the Internet. The barcode will happily scan and agrees with everything on the print of the "license." No DMV is going to give random bouncers access to the DMV database to validate whether an ID is valid or not, so, if you can print a convincing fake, the barcode check is meaningless.

The only non-marketing argument you can make, from the retailer's perspective, is it means you don't have to train your people nearly as well, and there's some latitude for honest mistakes on their part. Fun fact, in a few States I've worked in, the Liquor Authorities will send legally of age people into bars with expired licenses. If the bartender accepts the expired license, that's a violation, and they get cited. A barcode scanner would flag the license as expired even if the bartender missed it, forgot to check, etc. I could make my peace with the process if they'd post a privacy policy saying they aren't retaining the information or using it for any purpose other than age validation.

My added emphasis to your text, have you not noticed the trend towards scanning the barcode on your driver's license when carded for alcohol, tobacco, or other age restricted products? With one honorable exception (a weed dispensary) I have never seen any retailer that engages in this practice post a privacy policy detailing what they're doing with that information, how long they retain it, etc. There are even a few retailers that now refuse to accept any ID they can't scan, so if you're inclined as I am to carry around ID without a scannable barcode (I carry my Passport Card for this use case) they'll refuse to sell to you.

My issue here, FWIW, is Big Data rather than Big Brother. I don't care if Uncle Sam knows I bought beer. He can figure it out anyway from my credit card statements. I do care if all of my PII is in some shitty poorly secured marketing database, just waiting for Yet Another Data Breach, identity theft, and all that drama I'd very much like to avoid.

It only works with PornHub and related sites because they have a physical, legal, and financial presence in the United States.

Weirdly, none of the .EU porn sites I like are following these laws. Nor are any of the public and private porn BitTorrent trackers. Nor is USENET.

I have zero sympathy for PornHub and its ilk but these laws won't actually keep any kids away from porn. If you're posting on /. I think you're smart enough to know that. Unless Mommy and Daddy are willing to take away the always online smartphone and/or actually involve themselves in their kid's lives, porn will remain as accessible as ever, because, weirdly, the Internet doesn't stop at State/National borders nor does it give a damn about someone's sense of morality.

Side note, I'm happily kid free myself, but if I did have them, I'd opt for taking away the fucking smart phone and would prohibit them from being on any form of social media. Instagram has done more damage to teenage mental health than PornHub.

That's nonsense if you know anything about how porn works today. Porn, like a lot of things, has been ruined by "platforms", e.g., PornHub and friends. They do not create original content. They host content created by others. Frequently this content is posted without the consent of those involved (i.e., revenge porn) or without the appropriate permission from copyright holders (what you're referencing with DMCA takedown notices). They have not done nearly enough to crack down on either of these problems, as anyone who has been the victim of revenge porn will attest to, or, for that matter, actual sex workers who are not paid for their work because PornHub is essentially piracy done at scale for n00bs too lazy to figure out how BitTorrent and USENET work.

I am pretty far from being an anti-porn crusader, I grew up on online porn before the Internet was a mainstream thing (we got it from BBSes), but Pornhub and ilk broke porn as rapidly as Facebook broke the non-xxx Internet. Look up the story of GirlsDoPorn, it's pretty damned gross, and while PornHub didn't COMMIT the crime, they sure didn't mind profiting from it. You can still find GDP content on PornHub to this day, the DCMA process in this context is an absolute joke, as the victims will attest to.

The only "legitimate" porn sites these days are the ones operated by studios themselves, direct to consumer, and "legitimate" in this context very much depends on a lot of assumptions, as GirlsDoPorn would have presented as a legitimate studio/site until the full story came out.

Except they can't, because Apple won't approve any browser app for iOS/iPadOS that does not use WebKit. Apple's public rationale is security but that's a thin argument if you understand how apps are sandboxed in iOS/iPadOS. The only apps that aren't sandboxed are Apple's own apps and it's not for nothing that most (all?) of the zero day exploits that target these platforms exploit problems with the native/included apps and libraries.

Oh, lots of people are, just not in this particular thread.

I tell them to go spend a few hours in the local VA ER waiting room and come back to me about how awesome public health care would be.

The lack of clear English isnâ(TM)t the frustrating thing with modern day customer "service". I have lived in non-English speaking locales and can roll with a language barrier. The problem is outsourced customer "service" ain't empowered to do a damn thing except read from a script and by the time I'm frustrated enough to make a call it's invariably for a problem too complicated to solve with a script. AI will not fix this problem. It will just leave you yelling at a disempowered computer rather than a disempowered human being. The solution to this problem would require the C-Suite thinking of customer service as SERVICE rather than a pointless expense to be minimized.

As the person who has been responsible for responding to law enforcement video requests and occasionally (three times) testifying as to that process and their authenticity, it's exceptionally rare (never personally seen it) for CCTV footage alone to convict someone. Most of the time it leads the police to a suspect, usually because someone they know recognized them (not for nothing that the police frequently publish these videos/images) and then the idiot convicts themselves by talking to the cops (pro-tip, never do this). Less frequently it leads to other witnesses and/or evidence that gets them convicted.

Most of the time it doesn't do a damn thing because the crime in question isn't worth the police resources to follow up on, even if you have something pretty damning, like a legible license plate.

If AI enhancement results in more arrests for crime, I'd wager it comes about largely through the police releasing the enhanced images to the media, with the suspect(s) then being outed by their friends/family. Cops go talk to the suspect, he's an idiot and thinks he can outsmart them, and ends up saying incriminating things. Same as today, it'll just be higher quality images on the local news.