A trade deficit is caused by a country consuming more than it produces. That's it.

Americans collectively don't save and their government spends more than it takes in in revenue. The extra consumption has to be imported.
You can argue about the "why" but the deficit is about consuming more than they produce.

To be a victim of fraud you would have to have been lied to or decieved and been deprived of something. If someone pretends to be you and an institution doesn't validate that they are really talking to you then the institution has been decieved. Saying you are the victim allows the instituition to pass the blame and inconvinience on you for their mistake. It is an excuse for the institutions to not pay you for inconviniencing them.

18 months ago someone walked into a bank branch 3000km from where I live, didn't show ID, social engineered the teller over the coarse of 3 visits and took 40K from a credit line I no longer had access to. The bank paid for my time explaining to them what the did wrong.

Let's correct this fallacy when someone impersonates you to an institution you are not the victim of identity fraud the instititution is. You are should only be merely inconvinienced. And f@#K the banks or who ever who ask you to jump through hoops to fix their mistake. It is up the institutions to ensure that they gave the aid/loan/whatever to the correct individual.

In this case it looks like the colleges didn't check people's identities very well knowing that the federal student aid program would eat the cost. This is a moral hazzard. The college's want students paying tuition, they have no incentive to check identities because that would mean turning away someone who is paying. The federal student aid programs likely had no way to physically meet the students so they delegated the work to an unmotivated party, the colleges. The easy fix is to put the colleges on the hook for the faud. They should also be on the hook, at least partially, for students who don't pay back the loans. That would quickly eliminate degrees that don't lead to jobs that pay well enough to pay back the loans. If colleges don't like the deal then they don't need to accept students on federal aid.

The cables aren't the bottle neck. It is getting approval to buy them. The electric utilities in most of the western world are guarenteed a return on any capital investment usually of between 11% and 13%. In return they have to go to the public regulators to get approval for any capital expenditures. It is the regulators that won't approve the spending of money on new transmissions. The public regulators are the dumbest institutions on the planet. If you think you have delt with the stupidest government regulators in the world you still won't be prepared for the utility regulators. The power outages in Texas, blame the public regulator for forgetting to have any incentive for insuring power supply during a cold snap. PG&E's power lines fail, start forest fires, people die, blame the regulator for not allowing PG&E to replace them. OG&E raising your rates to pay for 2 peaker plants when they instead had a plan to cut your median rate by $50 month by shifting demand, blame the public regulator.

Here is John Oliver explaining the problem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Just ignore the last 5 minutes where John forgets everything he said for the previous 20 minutes and goes on his anti capitalism rant.

Taxing negative externalities like pollution and CO2 is the best way to deal with them.

How is this a capitalism problem? The problems are all created by a dictator manipulating markets, building what didn't need to be built, creating the wrong jobs and no internal demand for goods. The only capitalism here is a free market creating and charging for a good that is in demand.

Being a dick is independent to how much money you have. You should like the rich, they pay far more taxes in absolute terms (and usually as a percentage of earnings), they invest and take risks. They own the means of production that makes the poor more productive. They buy/build and maintain the housing that most of the poor live in. If you don't like the arrangement you are free to get together with others in your "class" and create your own communist paradise. Heck you can collect welfare and have your kids educated by the rest of us while you try. The fact that no one ever does without trying to take the means of production says all there needs to be said about communism.

Elon Musk, the guy that proved electric cars could be profitable, was always a dick, the left though chose to make him their enemy.

Read the wiki you linked. It is a way to serialize data structures. It defines how the data is moved between machines and it is terrible for parsing. It is {type, length, value} triples on steroids where your values can be be a series of further {type, length, value} triples. Now think of how you would write a parser. You are going to recursively parse the triples. Now what happens when the outer length doesn't match the sum of the inner triples lengths? Depending on how you wrote your parser you will either use the outer length or the inner one. (some triples can be variable length so this does get confusing). The result is different parsers are now parsing differently. I could then create a cert that to a CA looks harmless, have them sign it but my target might parse it differently and give me an incorrect permission.

Some people used to say be liberal in what you accept and very strict in what you send. That is you should be willing to accept some errors or messages that don't exactly follow the protocol but always adhere to the standards when sending messages out. Unfortunately this leads to all kinds of security problems. Problems that can't be fixed because the errors are in legacy devices, or problems that the discoverer of the problem has no ability to fix.

The worst example is ASN1. The legacy parsers are terrible for accepting malformed messages and still outputting what seems to be valid output. Except different parsers will output malformed messages differently. Fixing this won't be easy because it would mean rejecting many legacy data structures. For those of you who don't know, ASN1 is the encoding method for X509 certificates.

It's that F#@King simple. Americans consume more goods, services and government services (the American military is a service), than they produce. So Americans collectively must get more services and goods from the outside world than they export to the rest of the world.
This isn't a class issue, this isn't a moral problem or a decline in productivity. It is a choice by individuals. Why do Americans spend more than they produce? Because others will loan them money at near 0% real interest rates, Americans are generally secure in their futures and don't feel the need to save for a rainy day and finally Americans get good value for what they buy. (yes the poor might not be totally secure but in the grand scheme of a trade deficit the middle class is all that counts).

The stack ranking is now gamed. People form groups to protect themselves and then they single out a few individuals in their "team" and snitch on them about various things these people might have done. Things like a joke between friends that is taken out of context or a misunderstanding or the individual who takes responsibility for fixing a big problem suddenly finds themselves as being reported as being the cause of the problem.

Often people are in the targeted group for being in the wrong caste.

Most managers have some idea this is going on but any manager who didn't play the game quickly finds themselves a target. It creates a work place of zero loyalty. As soon as someone stumbles, regardless of how good they were in the past many people start treating them like a pariah. No sense forming alliances with someone who will be fired soon.

Because the market will drift towards one standard market which google controls. Google is the exchange where buyers and sellers come together. No one else can compete. No new market place can arise, to sell ad space you need websites to sign up for your market but no one will because there are no buyers. Once Google became dominant the other markets collapsed. Ads are the castle where google makes 90% of their money. Everything else, gmail, search, android, is just a mote to protect the castle.

This is a bad monopoly. Google can distort the market. They control any innovation. They can literally decide what startups can advertise and which can't. In the past market places where at least a little public or where they were private competing market places could be built. This is not true for website ads.

Now if we could just remove the farm and construction safety exemption for SUVs that will never be used for construction or farming we could save even more lives. For example a car or a mini van must hit the average person, cyclist or child low enough to have them fall on the hood and not take excessive damage to the vital organs. Most SUVs have hoods above my waist and I'm 5'11".

If you love math you will love it's application to creating a privacy coin. https://www.getmonero.org/libr...

The USA currently has lots of really good paying jobs in services. I'm not sure why voters in the USA want to have more jobs sewing shirts or assembling electronics. US unemployment is 4%. I'm not sure where the USA will get lots of people to work for $10 a day especially if they are deporting all the Mexicans.

The US trade deficit is caused by Americans collectively consuming more than the produce. If Trump wants the USA to have a trade surplus then he can just cut the US consumption. The US has a 1.13T capital account deficit. The US defense budget is 824B. So maybe cut that and change the law on taxing interest on mortgages and American consumption would easily fall by 1.2T.