Impossible to build. I calculate that it would have to be 865 million miles in diameter to produce enough energy and at least 93 million miles away to keep from cooking us in our own juices. We simply do not have the technology to make such a thing.

Thank (the god or devil of your choice) it wasn't ants, otherwise we would be fighting "Them".

now I can stop holding my breath.

So what about the two huge fabs they have in Richardson TX (a suburb of Dallas)? First fab was completed in 2001. Four more in Sherman TX, and two in Utah. As far as I can tell using google these are the only wafer fabs TI owns. I assume that offshore facilities are mainly IC assembly/packaging which has been offshored by most US manufacturers since sometime before 1976. I know that because I worked for a fab company in Carrollton TX (another suburb of Dallas) back then and all of their assembly/packaging was done in Malaysia.

I don't know why people keep forgetting this but Bush and congress took most of the Iraq war spending off the books so that it did not show up as deficit spending. Obama put that spending back on the books which added several trillion dollars (I've heard between $2 and $8 trillion) to the deficit which of course Republicans blamed him for. This was a significant portion of the debt that occurred during the Obama administration and I would like to put all the blame on Republicans for this but Democrats for the most part supported that war. I don't believe they supported the "budget trick" to keep it off the books but I could not find with a quick search if that was correctt.

AI industry tells US congress: "we need socialism" There, fixed the heading for you.

I think Elon should de-orbit from Adderall as soon as possible.

May I suggest ear plugs. What doesn't come out can't be spread around.

Google GalliumOS. It is a Linux distribution made exclusively for chromebooks. Works well on my Dell Chromebook 11 3120 with only 4 GiB RAM. Serious downside is that it hasn't been upgraded since 2019, You can still get some updated packages but I'm fairly sure they are old too.

"ERCOT dropped the ball once so far in the almost 30 years here" Please google Texas power outage Feb. 2011. After that storm a committee was formed to determine why electric power and natural gas (which is used by most electric generator facilities in Texas) suffered massive outages and it all came down to natural gas facilities were not properly winterized. So, in order to fix this the Texas legislature "requested" that the natural gas suppliers winterize their facilities. Fast forward to 2021 and it turns out that all but one supplier ignored the "request" with completely predictable results. The one gas supplier that did winterize their facilities continued to supply gas with no outages at all. An guess who Hey Abbott still blames, renewables of course. And just to be the devils advocate for a moment, the windmills in Texas also had problems with winterizing but that was not the main cause of the outages. I continue to be aghast/appalled at the ability of people to forget anything/everything that has happened in the past when they want to deflect blame. Dangerously rising medical costs have been with us since the Reagan administration and yet according to some it has only been happening for the last four years. The Clinton administration's attempt to do something about it was thwarted by the usual suspects. Then nobody else did anything until the ACA which was massive watered down by the same suspects. This is but one of many examples (vaccines anyone? Just to double down).

Pretty much all of Florida is in danger of being submerged too. Contrary to a previous post most of the US is on solid bedrock. But Florida is for all practical purposes on a sandbar.

As I understand it, if you don't measure sea levels they won't rise.

Yes but it helps to remember that was J. Edgar "there are commies under my bed but at least the Mafia doesn't exist" Hoover's FBI. Lock, stock and barrel. There is little resemblance to today's FBI.

OK, the first actually commercially usable ORBITAL launch/landing! The obvious difference is that DX-X test is at least an order of magnitude or more less difficult than an orbital launch/landing (sorry Jeff). It proved the concept but it was not even close to a commercially viable launch vehicle.

Overpriced (>$140), under powered (1GHz single core RISCV CPU, 1 GiB DDR RAM). Whats not to like? Take a look at the StarFive 2 SBC, full disclosure the only relationship I have with StarFive is that I bought one. 4 core 1.5 Ghz RISCV CPU, 2 GiB/4 GiB/8 GiB versions with the 8 GiB version going for ~ $100. Close enough to the Pi 4, if you can find one at anywhere near retail price, to be a REAL competitor with a RISCV processor.