This wasn't even a Bill, it was just a motion. Basically just a statement with no legally binding effect on anything. I wouldn't lose my mind over it just yet.

Capitalism v communism is one spectrum. Perhaps a more useful lens to view this through is one of totalitarianism v a free society. Government agencies using backdoors seems like it skews towards the totalitarian side of the spectrum.

More context:

“We’re going to end up with complete autonomy, and I think we will have complete autonomy in approximately two years.” That doesn’t mean city streets will be overflowing with driverless Tesla vehicles by 2018 (coincidentally, the company’s Model 3 should be on roads by then). Musk expects regulators will lag behind the technology. He predicts it will take an additional year for regulators to determine that it’s safe and to go through an approval process. In some jurisdictions, it may take five years or more, he says.

Normalization is good because otherwise when one of your users gets married and wants to change her surname you realise that every entry in every table that relates to the user has their surname recorded and you have to update millions of rows in twenty different tables and none of it is documented and if you miss updating it any of the tables you might break something important. In a normalised database you change it one place and you are done.

My Mother would drop me off at Kmart in the electronics section every Saturday for a couple of hours while she went shopping. They had a C64 and people would write stupid little programs that printed text on the screen. I watched them, figured out how to stop the running code and get into the editor and by trial and error figured out how to change the text, make it repeat in different ways and add colour.

Nagged my parents into buying me an Amstrad CPC464 and got a book on how to write text adventure games on the Amstrad CPC464. The first real program I remember writing was a random character generator for Dungeons and Dragons. Never did get it to generate an all 18's character despite running it hundreds of times! :)

I'd argue that small, industrialised economies had a higher cost per capita to change over to metric because some fixed costs are distributed over a smaller population. Australia changed over between 1970 and 1988, and the world didn't end and there weren't riots on the streets. I really think this is one way in which the USA is broken - nobody can agree on changing things so nothing gets changed, even when it would be better in the long term. That is not a good thing and contributes to a slow decline in competitiveness.

We still use imperial units when precision is not important, and where it is customary. We still talk about a person's height in feet, and talk about "mileage" even though we actually measure distances in kilometres.

The three largest expenses of the US Federal government are Social Security, Healthcare and the military. If defense was handled at the state level it would be difficult to prevent some states being free-riders, particularly land-locked states. Healthcare and social security could possibly be handled at the state level but the costs would still exist and would result in a great deal of duplication. Also, big business would love to be able to play individual states off against eachother for the best tax deal. It would be a very different country - in fact each state would operate much more like an individual country with all the potential for internal conflict that that entails.

This doesn't excuse waste, but it is extremely naive to think that large corporations are intrinsically any less wasteful and bureaucratic than government departments once they achieve a certain size.

Just don't kill yourself or some else doing it. Some of those components have very high voltages.

Maybe he is talking about the IE "fiasco" where they needlessly tried to integrate IE with Windows in order to (successfully) drive Netscape out of the browser business, bring down a decade of antitrust heat on themselves and very nearly getting Microsoft broken up into three separate companies by the Department of Justice? Or is that your definition of a "raging success"?