Especially on any kind of absolute scale, when the amounts get so large. It's easier if you consider it in relation to other large governmental expenditures. Fox News (which tends to under-estimate war cost, IMO) has estimated the cost of the Iraq war at >$700B. How does the ISS stack up to that in terms of value to the world? Is it worth about 1/7 of that? More? Less? I'm not sure it stacks up as well against every other possible use of $100B, but I'd personally much rather have another 6 space stations than what we've gotten in exchange for our other $600B spent on war.

Then when your email gets to google, it's stored unencrypted, google reads the contents of the email and displays advertising based on those contents. (Aside: that bit of the OP was funny. Because while google's customer service reps don't read email themselves, the system does, and you often get ads on your gmail pages that say "you could be doing better than ...") At that point a rule in your intended recipient's gmail configuration could, accidentally or intentionally, forward that message to another server, to which google will make an unencrypted connection and where the message will, a second time, be stored unencrypted.

Though they're improvements over the old status quo, https and POP/IMAP/SMTP-TLS are not substitutes for encrypted email.

The driver is not specifically for the wind. That's the same chip used in cheap USB wireless adapters like this one and RealTek has been providing their OS X driver for some time. The driver and associated utility do not work very well, FWIW, and I don't suggest trying to use them with a Mac unless you really have no other option.