Advocates for all kids going to college love to cloud this by citing stats about how much more money college graduates make than non-attenders over their careers, and it's impressive but deceptive. They use these arguments to convince kids to go to college, while then also encouraging them to "follow their passions/interests" and take ANY major. One big problem here is that the in-demand technical majors (the ones that will be hardest to study in college) are distorting the stats. The average kid going off to college is NOT studying to be a surgeon, NOT going to end up as a Principle Engineer at SpaceX or Apple, NOT going to be in a corner office at JP Morgan, or a lobbyist/lawyer in Washington DC etc. All too often, the kids taking the "you MUST go to college" advice are majoring in stuff that will likely NEVER pay off, and the folks in academia pushing all this are making out like bandits as colleges and universities double- and triple-down on the prices knowing full-well that the incoming freshmen have ZERO experience with debt and interest and no real appreciation for what those massive student loans will do to them. It's nice to imagine all the fine people advising the young along these lines are well-meaning and unbiased, but they are HUMANS and as always, "follow the money" is a good idea. The institutions involved have massively increased their non-professor staffs to insane levels, often creating and filling new positions that were never previously needed and contribute ZERO to student success - and SOMEBODY needs to provide the money for those salary and benefit packages.

The stats the kids SHOULD be given are [1] the odds of them graduating with the major they start with (many difficult majors are never completed) [2] the odds of them getting a job with that major, [3] the salary they can expect with a typical job obtained with that degree and the average longevity thereof, [4] The total debt they are likely to incur getting that degree (including not just tuition, but also books, labs, living expenses, additional tutoring and such that typical kids on that track incur) and [5] the likely costs of servicing that debt plus paying it off and the YEARS this will likely take. Some degrees (often the ones that will produce the best jobs) are so difficult/intensive that the student will be unable to hold a job while studying and thus need to finance all their expenses for those years. For those kids who never graduate, or who down-shift to a different/easier major (which may produce lower income results) all the debts will still be there... and most young college-bound kids are not truly equipped to appreciate what that may mean for them. It's not just that they do not truly grok the amounts of money, and effects of interest, they are likely also not equipped to understand how the psychological weight of that debt and the prospect of living under it for many years will affect them. It will also not likely occur to them to think about how difficult it could be to take on additional loans (for things like homes and cars) when banks see how much debt they are already under as they graduate from college. There are many reasons family formation and initial home purchases are getting delayed later and later into peoples' lives, but this stuff is certainly a major factor.

This all went completely out of control when the Obama administration did a federal government takeover of the student loan program. They made it so any kid could get loans, of nearly unlimited sizes, and for any majors... which was OBVIOUSLY going to be inflationary to anybody familiar with the old Law of Supply and Demand. Many of us predicted this and warned about it back at the time, and were were often denounced as "racists" etc on the theory that we just did not want poor black and brown people to be educated. The accusations were vile, and dishonest, and just a way to re-direct away from some very basic economic arguments, which if addressed back then would have spared countless young people of all skin colors and backgrounds a tremendous amount of grief. It's simply not possible to take all the limits off one side of an economic equation and not have really bad things happen. While it was Obama that did it, it was not his color or gender or party that caused this either, it would have gone just as badly had some white Republican female president done it. It was just a combination of economic laws, and human nature, that made this a really bad (and predicted and warned about) idea.

Have you BEEN to a Department of Motor Vehicles? Do you like the IRS? Are you impressed by the financial care you see in Pentagon procurements? The FCC's control of the airwaves? the service of Amtrak?

I cannot comprehend the attitude that starts with "this sucks" and says: "let's make it better with tons of new unaccountable anonymous bureaucrats, tons of new paperwork and policies tied to unrelated political goals that change with each election, and piles of unionized government workers who cannot be fired and who have no competition."

The question SHOULD have been: "Why have they no been broken-up yet"?

The merger of Boeing and McDonnell Douglas should NEVER have been allowed in any SANE world. The USA likes to think of itself as a country with a market-based economy... but that massive merger of Boeing and McD was the final step in the Boeing drive to eliminate all domestic airline builder competitors. The natural result was the 737Max fiasco where government needed its one supplier so badly that it essentially let it regulate itself - and the result killed hundreds of innocent people.

On first blush this crash LOOKED just like the Chicago DC-10 crash, and given that the MD-11 is a DC-10 derivative, even I thought it was the same cause when I initially saw the video.

The DC-10 was a very impressive design, but with a couple of design flaws that lead to a lot of deaths. When I first learned about those initial flaws long ago (Aft cargo door latch flaws, and all sets of redundant controls rigged along the underside of the passenger deck) I decided I'd never fly on one. Early cargo door failures caused the cargo bay to depressurize, which cause the deck to buckle, taking out all the primary and backup controls at once [facepalm]. These problems were eventually corrected. The Chicago crash did indeed begin with the left engine departing from the aircraft on the takeoff, causing a left roll and crash, (which is why the two incidents look the same on video) BUT the root cause of the engine loss was NOT the same as the recent UPS MD-11. With the DC-10 crash, the maintenance crew used an unapproved method to remove the engine for maintenance and re-install it (a fork lift, IIRC). In doing so they saved themselves time, but they damaged the engine mounting hardware. The Chicago crash was, therefore, cause by deliberate human actions contrary to the design documents of the aircraft. There are some single-point failure items there because modern airliners are designed to allow their engines to shear-off in certain situations as a safety feature. The UPS MD-11 incident APPEARS to be a fatigue failure in the aft spherical bearing of the engine mount - NOT a deliberate human mis-deed. It's a little early to fault Boeing for not anticipating a premature failure of a particular solid piece of metal with no documented evidence of fatigue. This is, of course, preliminary and I have every confidence in the NTSB; we will all have the answer with certainty in about 12 months.

Incidentally, I eventually DID fly on the DC-10 and would do so even today on a properly maintained one. Like its competitor, the L1011, these Tri-jets were amazing bits of tech from a unique time. Like any new tech, they needed a bit of time to mature, but once the initial problems were fixed, they were perfectly safe when properly operated, maintained, and inspected. The simple truth is that a DESIGN can be good, and yet an individual instance of it can fail for an oddball reason (like a subtle flaw in a solid hunk of metal from which a component was milled). It's easy for somebody with an opinion and an internet connection to assert that a design is bad if even one instance of it fails, but that's just not life in the real world, and anybody who thinks it is is welcome to try producing something 1% as complex but with absolute perfection. These MD-11s were still in service because the owners still found them to be the optimal solution to particular challenges. There are airliners in wide use today that I still would not board because I consider some of the design choices made to be risky, and that's BEFORE introducing things like metal fatigue into the mix.

Use caution when trusting the New York Times to properly inform you of anything technical; it's not really in their wheelhouse. They're really more of a people-and-politics rag that benefits from a cushy set of back channels to some people in industry and government. For anything related to transportation either within the USA or involving a vehicle built in the USA, the single best entity of the US Government is your friend: The NTSB. The NTSB is small, and has no power to regulate anybody, so they're mostly left alone and unaffected by politics (an insanely rare thing in government). They bring in the experts they need on a case-by-case basis and they do not allow anybody to pressure them on time as they do their one true job: investigate transportation failures and write detailed, clear reports that anybody may freely read in order to benefit everybody with increased safety. Because they stay tightly focused on that one job, they do it better than anybody else on Earth, and it's really too bad other parts of out government cannot seem to adopt this model.

all Democrats are for mass-murdering millions of people - since they're for various degrees of Marxism and the pursuit of Marxism killed over a hundred million people in the 20th century...

Wow. This brain-dead over-simplified method of analysis is FUN. Yup. If everybody played such ignorant games with political stuff the world would be a MUCH friendlier and better place where everybody gets along... [/sarc]

I know you thought you were being clever, but you made a dumb assertion and did not even make a cheap attempt to justify the assertion. Nothing at all. Zippo. Zilch. I made a better argument in may sarcastic reply [facepalm]. Next time at least deploy a teensy smidge of effort and type something like "I believe {stupid idea X} for the following reason...."

You miss on every detail, so while it's probably funny to you and anybody else ignorant of the basics, it lacks a core element of comedy: a basis in truth or reality and thus will only be funny to those in your bubble rather than everybody generally. Put another way, you're doing Jimmy Kimmel not Johnny Carson.

I'll start with the least critical common error of your thinking: The devil of the Bible is NOT the devil of Dante Alighieri (see: Divine Comedy). He is a created being, cast down and condemned, and NOT in charge of anything related to hades/hell. God does not have him running the place. He's doomed to be just another inmate in hell eventually and is not the guy in a red suit with a tail who is in charge of keeping the fires hot and punishing people. People who actually take the time to READ the books they are critical of know this.

Like many on the irreligious left, you think Jesus was the smiling "Buddy Christ" of comedy movie fame, rather than the figure described in Biblical texts. That's fine if it flips yer trigger, but it does not earn you any credibility among serious literate people. You presume that because he's is (in your mind) "Buddy Christ" he would insist on open borders and a (naturally then required) grand Marxist redistributionist economic model. It fails on many levels because of many of the things he is recorded as saying/teaching. This is related to another common myth of the left: that Jesus was an illegal alien or a refugee. Jesus of Nazareth was NOT born in Bethlehem because his parents were homeless - they had a home, but were required by the Roman government to go to the city where Joseph was born for census and taxation reasons. Jesus as a newborn was not in a manger because his poor illegal immigrant parents were homeless, but rather, his parents could not get a room at the inn because the place was booked-up because a hostile occupying government forced too many people to travel at the same time and massive modern hotels were not a thing yet. Joseph, the stepdad if you will of Jesus, was no unemployed bum - he was a tradesman (a carpenter/mason). While there was indeed a point in his early life where Jesus (with Joseph and Mary) went into Egypt to escape King Herod's death orders, there's no evidence it was an illegal entry into Egypt, nor did they STAY there and demand citizenship or social services. When the specific threat to the life of the young Jesus was over, the family returned to Israel.

If you are thinking that the Jesus guy those religious people you dislike claim to follow is the cartoon version you seem to think he is, you will never understand the people you are attempting to lampoon, and thus your attempts to mock them will only succeed amongst similarly ignorant people. That person who taught love, charity, kindness, etc ALSO was the one who taught it was not appropriate to give excessively to the poor, to reward those who do not work over those who do, and taught that things like marriage ought to be MORE strictly defined than the marriages of the day (to name but a few items). He may well have fed lots of fish and bread to people who followed him and listened to him on one particular occasion, but he is not recorded as feeding everybody everywhere he went. The Jesus who saved the prostitute from punishment and forgave her sins ALSO told her to go forth and not do it any more; the first part of that does NOT mean he was "tolerant" and embraced "alternate lifestyles". If you only recognize certain aspects of what Jesus taught (the ones you like to use as a weapon) and not the rest then you're not really talking about the same person that the people you oppose are talking about... and they KNOW that... and thus your criticism is hollow and ignorant.

Demonstrate some literacy and intellectual curiosity and actually go read an entire Bible, cover-to-cover, as though it was any other volume you were going to seriously read. You do not need to do this for religious reasons, but rather, for intellectual reasons. The best critics are the ones who actually know what they are talking about. You're not there yet. Not by a large margin.

George Will and Bill Kristol are the sort of "Republicans" and "Conservatives" that drive the rank-and-file conservatives in the GOP crazy... they made piles of money over decades writing books, going on speaking tours and cruises, and being generally treated as very respected wise men... only to go completely insane and argue loudly against everything they previously claimed to stand for the moment a politician came along who actually might DO what they had been publicly only TALKING about for decades. They are the very epitome of the man OUTSIDE the arena; they guys who talk, talk, talk other people into taking actions and then panic and scream and run and hide when somebody does what they said they wanted done.

Here's the dirty little secret to why so many "establishment" and "thought leader" Republicans went the way George and Bill did: Trump broke their business model and threatened to destroy their social lives. As long as they TALKED about various policies (which were NOT enacted), they were tolerated in the fancy dinners and parties and other gatherings of society's elites as interesting or quirky objects of conversation and fascination. As soon as those things were about to happen, the left-leaning elites went mad and would no longer tolerate people who disagreed with them - they insisted the politically different be SILENCED, de-monitized, and de-platformed. The only way guys like George and Bill were gonna be invited to anything again by their pals was if they joined-in on the war against Trump. The other part is this: The opinion makers and thought leaders of the old GOP made a ton of money every election cycle as consultants to various Republican campaigns and candidates. When anybody talked about running for office, these sorts (or their agents) would contact the would-be candidate and say "you can only win with my ideas and my help, and that's gonna cost you.... With the 2016 campaign, Trump destroyed that business model. It wasn't even close. He ignored all those guys (and saved MILLIONS of dollars) and won a race they all claimed he could not possibly win, thereby destroying them doubly (1st by winning without them, and again by proving them wrong in predicting his failure without them). Those with an interest in campaigns, financing, and history would do well to study the numbers on both sides of the political aisle in the 2016 fight - it's eye-opening.

The business model of the entire GOP campaign consulting class and the think tankers on the right has been altered forever and they are not handling it well. The same thing is likely to happen at some point on the left with some future out-of-the-box Dem candidate trashing the business model of the rich beltway opinion makers and consultants over there. Too many people still think this is Bad Orange Man specific; I do not think that. I think it's in-the-box fossilized thinkers versus out-of-the-box rebels and rebels in both the GOP and the Dem sides will ultimately show this.

He's not a good one to invoke on the subject of political conservatives. People THINK he is, for good reason (as I'll explain) but serious political conservatives know better.

Barry Goldwater was not personally "conservative" - he self-identified as a libertarian. As a libertarian, Barry got the support of a bunch of young (at the time) conservatives within a Republican party that was dominated by pablum political sorts who now days are called "establishment" or even "RINO" (Republican In Name Only) political types. These Republican supporters of Barry helped him when he needed them, and thus in 1964 when the GOP looked to be going with people like Rockefeller (who conservatives at the time referred to as "rotten feller") and the desperate politically-active conservatives asked Barry to run for the Republican nomination, he felt he owed it to them to run and to champion their causes. He probably knew full-well that the effort would fail, given of his knowledge of DC politics and the GOP leadership. That presidential run, coupled with [1] his book The Conscience of a Conservative, and [2] the lack of anybody else in the GOP who was that different from the party's core establishment people, made Barry "Mr Conservative" in the eyes of most rank-and-file Republicans for many years. The luster only started to dim in those eyes many years later when Ronald Reagan was in office and far more-aligned with the conservatives while Barry's libertarianism had re-asserted.

On that book: The Conscience of a Conservative was not actually written by Barry and he did not necessarily agree with all of it. The book was ghost written for him by L. Brent Bozell Jr, whose son (L Brent Bozell III) would eventually arise in GOP circles as a staunch conservative and is currently Trump's ambassador to South Africa. While Ghost Writing has been around for a long time, many (most?) average Americans did not know much about it or pay attention to it even when explicitly told. People now are both more aware and more cynical and thus fewer today would likely read that book and then presume Barry was the definition of a conservative.

Now, to be fair to Barry (for whom I'll admit a bit of political fondness) I have little doubt that he encountered more than his fair share of uncompromising politically-active Christian "leaders". Every movement of every sort gets its share of self-appointed "leaders" who are in it for sometimes the most impure reasons (often power and money), so I have little doubt that he encountered his share of people on the political right who were the equivalent of the Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton types on the left. Such people fit into their own niches and do not necessarily define everybody they pretend to be like (be they charlatans of the left or of the right).

When founded, the United States was approximately 90% protestant Christian, approximately 10% Catholic, and the remaining tiny percent Jewish. There was no measurable number of any other belief system. People asserting "no, they were DEISTS!" are either deceiving or ill-informed... because the world view of those supposed deists was a Christian world view (Christian Bible, history, traditions, etc) and what was meant was more like what a modern person would mean if he said "non-denominational". When many of the founders wrote about these issues they wrote in the context and terms of their day, and while they all presumed a Judeo-Christian belief system. Many of that era were adamantly opposed to the schemes popular in much of Europe where it was considered that a "Christian nation" was a nation with an established (i.e. state created/mandated church, like the Church of England) Church (the Church part making it "Christian" as opposed to Hindu or Muslim, etc). Thomas Jefferson, for example, is oft cited as a man who did not believe in the supernatural and who originated the "wall of separation" (of Church and State), actually identified himself as a Christian, and when he edited his own version of a religious book with the supernatural stuff removed, used as his book the Bible, not a Quran or Bhagavad Gita. At the founding, nearly all US colonies (which became states) had official Christian churches and one could not hold office in any state without a statement of Christian faith. As a result the previous poster MAY have been right in asserting that it was a Christian nation by virtue of being founded by Christians, founded on Christian beliefs and principles, having a nearly entirely Christian population, etc. At the very least, one would have to say that the USA was circumstantially Christian when founded.

250 years ago, being a "Christian nation" would have meant a VERY different thing to people than it does now; there were plenty of people then who would have identified as, for example, Anglicans but not proceeded to identify as Christian in some sort of official sense. Such terms were taken seriously and carried some specific implications. In the early 21st century, things are very different - when people are asked their religion, many who are not even particularly religious will think something like "I'm not Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, or Atheist... so I must be Christian". That's a VERY different perspective and use of words, and the modern lack seriousness and of intellectual rigor should not confuse our understanding of the past.

If he meant that the country was founded with the Bible as its basic law, and requirements that all office holders be members of a certain national church and have statements of faith posted somewhere for public scrutiny etc, or that there is a Constitutional declaration that the nation is officially Christian (as opposed to founded and populated by Christians) with some Constitutional requirement that it remain a Christian nation then he is quite wrong. The founders left it to each generation to run the place for better or for worse.

Now, if YOU meant to imply that the country is naturally atheist, or agnostic, and that the founders were irreligious and said little about their religious beliefs then you are either in a fantasy book club of your own, or in one with the previous poster (depending upon what he meant with his post). This is the sort of thinking that leads lunatics to hyperventilate at the "threat" when they think they see the current nation (probably minority Christian at this point) move a tiny bit in the direction of more "Christian" (even in the modern watered-down sense) as though this might be something unprecedented. Anybody who reads much of what our founders wrote knows full-well that they were all very religious (practically hyper-religious compared to modern Americans) and that their beliefs were based on an assumption of the legitimacy of the Bible. The founders specifically invoke the Biblical God (the Christian Bible was the religious book of the day they all used) in multiple places in the Declaration of Independence ("...the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God..., "...all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator...", "...appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world..." (this one is interesting, because as readers of the Bible, including the Founders, know, the Book of Revelation identifies Jesus as the Supreme Judge of the World) "...with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence..."). There's simply no honest way to avoid all of this.

You can listen to all the modern biased college professors and self-appointed YouTube experts who tickle your ears with what you want to hear, and imagine anything you want about the past, but the simple thing is: If you want to know about the past, spend some time reading a few dusty old books by the people who were there at the time and who wrote stuff down in the simple hope that people like you and me would someday be wise enough to pick them up and read them and gain a little knowledge and wisdom the easy way (as opposed to: "by way of hard knocks").

Microsoft, like most corporate giants, started small with a founder or founders who had a good product or service. He/She/They proceeded to build the business, expand the product line, grow the customer base, and ... go public - effectively selling partial control to investors (who generally do not intimately know the business or industry and have only injected cash, but who get a board of directors and a say in the operation). Over time, as the company grows and time passes, the original person or persons die-off, or retire, or get tired of dealing with the board or the bigness of the business and cash-out.

The board then hires a CEO they think will do well, and it will seem to go well for years as a combination of corporate inertia and loyal employees and a devoted customer base all help to maintain the illusion. The board and its hired-gun CEO, however, were not there at the founding; they did not have the vision nor the drive and commitment to build the business in the first place and they are usually not competent enough to keep it afloat forever. There's always some CEO who is champion of some bright new idea to overhaul or re-do things or take "bold new steps" or some other drivel to "reinvigorate" the business. Everybody has seen Steve Jobs in a turtle neck boldly launching something and all these lesser players know the drill... but they usually so misunderstand the company they are leading that they drive it into the ground. When the incompetence is at peak, they will sell-off units/divisions and claim this retraction from a marketplace their predecessors were competent enough to enter and serve, and claim something stupid like they're "right sizing". It's a delusion, a mis-diagnosis of the actual problem that needs fixing. I suspect we're seeing a form of this common corporate disaster unfolding.

Microsoft's problem is NOT that the products are written in C/C++ (they became a mega-successful company on that very codebase)

Microsoft's problem is that every version of Windows is more bloated and more of a form of spyware than its predecessor. Coding it in Rust won't fix ANY of that. They can re-write their entire codebase in Forth or FORTRAN or any other bleeping language and it will have no impact on the actual problem. The company was born in the American culture with a team of young Americans (for better or worse) and this included the Yankee attitude that a person's personal computer was THEIRS and their data was THEIRS and what a person did with his computer was nobody else's business. Instead of leasing a computer and its OS, you could buy a computer and buy a Microsoft OS and then use it privately and securely and what you did with it was nobody else's business. The company's current CEO is not from the American culture (no, not skin color, CULTURE) and seems to not understand the entire POINT of the 1970s and 1980s microcomputer revolution. Not understanding the point, and not "getting it" on the independence and privacy stuff means he's gonna drive the company into a serious ditch at some point.

There's a massive corporate graveyard somewhere where the corpses of many dead former giants of industry lie, whose ghosts are anticipating the arrival of another former marketplace titan, named Microsoft. The investors need to keep an eye on this one. If the company does not straighten out and re-acquaint itself with the very reasons it exists, it will run out of time and it will become a rotting corpse of itself and get parted-out by some future idiot CEO trying to "right-size" it....

When a man and a woman form a family unit and have kids, the old-fashioned natural way, the damage from any person having such genetic issues is very limited; most modern families have very few kids and even older families on rural farms usually had fewer than ten. No husband and wife, no matter how enthusiastic and frisky are gonna have 200 kids.

When people decide that we all live in a brave new world now where the old rules no longer apply and mankind can do ANYTHING and consequences-be-damned, we can end-up breaking-down those firewalls which nature had put in place over millenia.

It has been pointed out, by persons wiser then me, that often traditions are actually the solutions people taught themselves long ago to problems they have long forgotten. This does not, of course, mean that all traditions are good, but rather that one should think long and hard about the possible consequences of up-ending traditions before doing it. We humans like to think of ourselves as all modern and evolved and able to monkey-around with nature with impunity. Why, we're not like those peasants on farms way back a hundred years ago, WE have SMARTPHONES!...

The donor here is not to blame (unless one takes the position that the very idea of sperm donors is bad, and thus he should not have been a donor) - let's face it: if the screeners did not know about the problem, then the donor likely did not know. The problem of a bunch of women all getting pregnant by the same man IS a problem and would be prevented by the tradition that men and women pair-up to make kids instead of all the women in town going to the one most-handsome or wealthiest guy in town...

All throughout Western Civilization (does not seem to happen elsewhere) there are people (generally globalist and business oriented) making the argument for mass immigration from 3rd world countries, and when they think they are not getting their way, or are getting their way but more slowly than they want, they like to use this particular argument, which average people never seem to think to question. The argument is:

"The risk is it could lead to shortages of critical skills that end up harming [fill-in the national name] competitiveness."

It comes from the elites and it SOUNDS so intelligent, and so intellectual, and so concerned with the well-being of the citizens, that people just accept it as some sort of proven fact. People hear it and end up thinking "oh, I guess we need to accept this immigration so we're not hurt", OR "well, I guess we're gonna have to take the hit, because we need to limit immigration anyway (for whatever reason, like reducing poverty or crime, etc)". Nobody seems to ever back off and question the obviously screwed-up dishonest premise. A nation cannot have grown to (in this example) 10 million having all the skills it needs and then, if it decides not to grow to 11 million, suddenly not have enough skilled workers. It's IMPOSSIBLE. Such a nation has already PROVED it has all the skilled people it needs for a population of 10 million. If the nation in question has not suddenly grown to 10 million from a much smaller population by explicitly importing all the skilled workers rather than raising and education its own population, then it has already PROVED the sustainability of those skills by raising and training the people currently doing those jobs.

This mass immigration of people into Western countries is largely driven by ONE thing: The wealthiest people (generally, the investor class) need to keep corporate profits up (and thus the revenue produced by their investments) and with human labor being often the most expensive part of a business that has SOME cost flexibility, they need a way to suppress the costs of wages and benefits. Average workers often miss the point that companies do not need to replace all their workers with cheap immigrants to push wages and benefits down. No. They only need to bring on a few immigrants, or in some cases simply have those immigrants in the community, in order to get the native population to be too insecure to ask for a raise or ask for improved benefits. A big corporation can be raking in record-breaking profits and yet employees can be afraid to ask for raises because they fear being replaced by an immigrant who is willing to work for less. The people pushing all the mass immigration would not be pushing it so hard if it was not very important to them.

This is not, and never has been, about race/ethnicity. The people pushing it WANT everybody to talk about it as a racial thing, so that any opponents can be trashed in public as "racists" and "xenophobes" (a FANTASTIC tactic for shutting-down any opposing argument without addressing any facts). The pushers of mass immigration are very happy to have all the arguments be: "our opponents are nasty snivelling little racists" rather than a detailed exploration of how multi-billion-dollar empires cannot afford to pay their workers a little more so they can afford decent homes, food, and healthcare. They do not want people questioning companies who lay off people the company cannot possibly afford to keep on, and need to reduce benefits for workers, yet CAN afford to have a CEO paid more than enough to cover those very costs. This has always actually been about CLASS and power and money - the things that actually matter the most to the elites in society, and which they most need the public to not pay attention to.

Your reading comprehension skills need some refreshing. He wrote:

"Spontaneous combustion doesn't exist. Combustion only occurs when things like fuel, heat/pressure, and oxygen are all shoved together." (highlighting is mine) and you only seem to have read the first sentence of the pair. He was clearly indicating that things like combustion do not arise for no reason and from nothing, that somebody brings things together in ways that CAUSE a reaction (in the illustration, combustion, but in the general topic, reactions to immigration issues). You then pointed to two examples WHERE SOMEBODY BROUGHT STUFF TOGETHER AND THUS STARTED A FIRE and somehow think that refutes his point that fires (or immigration issue reactions) only start when somebody brings things together in an unfortunate way...

Your supposed clever refutation is the fail.

Now, as to the point he was making:

I disagree on several points, but will only say this: I think his "solutions" are actually part of the problem with modern politics. He says "Try listening. Try acknowledging. Try reflecting. Try redirecting. Try doing the work of actual empathy..." which is (sadly) the sort of thing modern politicians and their obnoxious consultants, campaign managers, and strategists are all too adept at faking. Bill Clinton's famous "I feel your pain" line comes to mind. The scumbaggery of the modern political class is partly that they have a plan of action their masters/bribers/"campaign contributors" demand and they know it will upset the public, so they go on a "listening tour" and they acknowledge peoples' negative reactions, and they express an embarrassing level of empathy.... before completely ignoring the people and jamming their pre-selected policy through anyway. It works for them because far too many average people get too impressed by the totally fake and hollow words and emotions, and like the distracted audience in a magic show, they miss the sleight-of-hand. The general public is too-often too occupied by their own personal lives and lacks the patience and dedication to stay attentive and notice when, weeks or months after all the fine emoting WORDS, the ACTIONS of the politicians are completely contrary.

We do NOT need more politicians pretending to be concerned and responsive to their constituents by a bunch of mealy-mouthed platitudes and "town halls" then ramming bad policies into place anyway; we need more honest politicians who will either say "I'm gonna screw you over and take the money from rich special interests who fund me" OR who will listen to their constituents and then NOT DO THE BAD STUFF. With that level of honesty, people would do a better job of electing people and then actually getting what they voted for instead of always voting for stuff and then being surprised when they don't get it.

Yeah, it's all some grand oil-soaked conspiracy, THAT's the TICKET!

This is Slashdot, where people USED to be at least a little geeky and technical and all that stuff... so try thinking about the details of the Biden admin "green" scam on car mileage standards. Those standards were not unlike the Clinton admin "clean water" standards; they were a grand fraud meant to be used for politics and never to actually be employed. In the case of the Clinton water standards, they were not due to kick-in until after he would be out of office, and they required water authorities to clean their waste water to the point that it would be cleaner than the water in any normal lake or river before discharging it - a standard both insane (cleaner than nature before dumping into nature?) AND impossibly expensive (think of the little towns of 5 or 7 thousand people in "fly over" country where the tax base is tiny and there is no way to afford NASA-level water purification). When George W Bush (who I dislike and normally do not defend) got in and eliminated those standards (leaving the standards EXACTLY what they'd been all through the Clinton years) the howls from the left about Bush and Republicans wanting toxic dirty water were everywhere. There were lots of posts here on Slashdot by lefties ranting about those EVIL Republicans wanting toxic water. The whole thing (the new standards AND the reaction to their cancellation) was total political BS designed to fool ignorant people not paying attention.

Same thing here.

Have you thought of what it would require to MEET these new Biden standards, which Biden was never going to have to implement and live with the consequences of?

Do you have ANY freaking grasp of what tech would be required to make an internal combustion-powered vehicle that meets the needs of middle class families in middle America, does so SAFELY enough they want to put their families in them, and AFFORDABLY? Did you ever take any math, physics, and mechanics [the classical, not the automotive type] classes? Do you have any clue about how difficult it is to design and build such a thing, and not only get it through government approvals but then also have the design be able to be mass-produced in an affordable way that generates enough profit to keep the manufacturer in business AND still be something a family on an average income can afford? Remember: that new complies-with-Biden-rules vehicle would not only have to be getting 50 miles to the gallon, but it would have to survive all the crash tests and meet all the safety standards (or it cannot be sold) while hauling perhaps 5 or 6 people and a bunch of luggage/groceries/pets/etc and do it in all weather. Remember: this is not some academic exercise, we're talking REAL WORLD here, this impacts the buyers/drivers and passengers, the manufacturers, and indeed the entire economy. Some moron professor can pump a bunch of kids' brains full of this fluff all day long, without ever having had to earn a paycheck on planet Earth IMPLEMENTING anything - but that does not make his idyllic ideas worth anything more than the day dreams of a typical six-year-old in a sandbox.

The standard was clearly not intended to be achievable, and Biden admin people admitted as much; they were aligned with Gavin Newsom in CA who has said he intends HIS California standards to eliminate ICE vehicles and force everybody to go electric. This means the new standards were a FRAUD perpetrated on the public for POLITICAL reasons. Because I'm a nice guy, I'll move-on here and let's presume that this was all some well-intentioned we-know-better-than-you save-the-planet push into an all-electric utopian future...

Have you thought through how workable THAT take on the Biden rules scam was? Just how much more electricity needs to be available on the grid if you want to eliminate all gasoline-powered and diesel-powered cars and trucks to go electric? Have any of these politicians pushing this stuff made ANY provisions for that StarTrekian future??? Let's examine California, which insists all cars sold in 2035 (less than nine years from now to that car model year) and beyond be electric: The state is knocking down dams, shutting down nuclear plants, kicking-out the fossil fuel industry, etc and making illusory "green" progress by importing energy from other states (who then won't have those same "green" kilo-Watt hours for THEIR people to use) to claim progress. The grid is not being improved to move electricity around the state more efficiently, indeed the grid here is home to many miles of decaying infrastructure that sometimes triggers wildfires so massive that they dump vastly more carbon into the air than is being reduced by the "green" push. There are already times of day here when people are asked not to charge their e-cars WITH THE EXISTING SIZE FLEET OF ELECTRICS. Where is all the electricity to some from if all the autos go electric? Have you ever been bothered to do the MATH on what's required, or do you just trust the EXPERTS (political hacks) who are not themselves implementing ANYTHING to make this workable? Say what you want about the oil people and the "old" car companies making gas burner cars, but at least THEY make real-world solutions to the needs of normal people in the real world.

There's another part of this massive fraud that you guys never even consider: MAKING all those new e-cars. Have you ever listened to Elon Musk (a guy who at least seems inclined to support e-cars [cough]Tesla[cough]) address this? He has pointed out that the heavy-industry which is the auto industry has, over many decades, optimized itself to produce the approximate number of cars annually that the public will buy at normal turn-over rates which the public can afford (people have limited funds and need housing, food, healthcare, etc in addition to cars). If the industry over-builds it goes bankrupt with huge surplus inventories. If it under-builds it invites new entrants and new competitors, which it does not want, so it naturally becomes finely-tuned over time as an industry as a natural consequence of the economics. As a result, Musk has pointed out that if we stopped all gas car production and switched the industry to all-electric it would take (optimistically) about 25 years to build the required number of cars. The politicians pushing these "green" regulations are only allowing about ten years.

THIS is one problem with career politicians who have never done one damned productive thing in their lives, and whose degrees are in politics, government, or law, writing and enforcing such rules upon fields that require ENGINEERING and heavy manufacturing. It's easy for some moron who has never designed a product that needs to be mass-produced using heavy tooling, and never designed a product that has to clear safety standards and get regulatory approvals, and never designed a product that will KILL people if designed wrong, to make these sorts of fairy dust and unicorn fart fueled "green" rules, regulations, and laws. Anybody pushing these "green" policies should be forced to ENGINEER a safe, workable, manufacturable, affordable, practical, consumer-desireable solution that meets them... and be imprisoned for life at hard labor if they fail to do it in under three years (it takes time to work out the manufacturing, build or modify manufacturing facilities, re-train production line workers, and get through the government regulatory certifications, so that ten year window until these green dream regulations kick-in is really less than 5 for designing and prototyping). Since the people pushing these policies never seem to have the personal fortunes to IMPLEMENT them, and always depend of using the force of politics and law to make other people spend the cash on implementation, the phrase "put your money where your mouth is" cannot be applied - hence my proposal that they be made to put their butts where their mouths are (at hard labor if they fail) applies.

I re-state a question I have asked before:

Just how much more abuse will their customers take? When will users of Microsoft (or Apple) operating systems finally say ENOUGH? How much is too much? How far is too far? When will people finally say "all we wanted was a sold reliable OPERATING SYSTEM!" and turn their backs on these corporate dictators?

YOU own a computer and you want an OS for it... but THEY say when you MUST update, what features you MUST accept, where your files will be stored, who can see those files, they snoop on your keystrokes and mouse movements, monitor your media use... of, all for YOUR benefit of course...pay no attention to who might be monitizing it and using it to manipulate you and/or society generally...

The thing that worries me a bit is this: There are sadly too many in the Linux and BSD communities who look at Microsoft and Apple as things to emulate and keep seeming to think that Linux and BSD (and probably any other future OS somebody might write) needs to absorb a lot of the same badness.

First, No, for the following reasons:

1. The US was the originator of heavier-than-air powered flight, and thus the first-adopter and standard setter as well as the hub for much of the innovation in aviation. This lead to the early adoption of airlines and related entrepreneurship and the rapid build-out of airfields and related infrastructure. After WWI and again after WWII the US got the benefit of all those returning trained and experienced pilots... lots of stuff contributed to Americans adopting air travel. The US economy has also been heavily geared to productivity and the best use of man-hours, which lead to the highest-valued things (people) moving on the fastest means (air). The phrase "Time is money" applies here.

2. World War II and the post-war years saw the US move people to the skies and cargo to the rails. At the start of WWII and during the war, Americans who traveled by commercial means generally did so by train (unless they were rich). American soldiers often started their adventure on a train ride from small town America to boot camp, then took trains to a port city, and a ship to Europe or Asia. By the Korean War, they did so by plane. The American people themselves chose to fly for civilian trips and stop using passenger rail service except on short-haul runs within several metropolitan areas - so the rails were largely left to freight haulers, who did what American industry loves to do: optimize. The US rail system is now the most efficient on the planet - for moving FREIGHT. As a result, the US freight trains and operators have priority on the rails.

3. People in other countries may have much longer vacations, typical Americans use air travel to optimize their time-off. If you have two weeks off per year, you do not want to burn any of that time unnecessarily on the travel, unless the travel itself is what you want (like a train ride through the Rockies). American companies also do not like to waste employee hours on travel or burn money on travel, so when they send somebody somewhere it's going to be by plane rather than the slower AND more expensive Amtrak. It's Time Management, and planes always win that one.

4. Congress gave Amtrak, a quasi-government entity, control over all passenger rail travel. Their routes are sparse, their schedules are a joke, their prices are higher than the price for flying, their trips take too long (often multiple DAYS) so you need to eat their food on board (which is insanely expensive) and many of their routes are incomplete and deceptive (you'll need to get off the train at some point, board a Greyhound bus for several hours, then get onto a different train to resume the trip (in other words: you're NOT going to get a good sleep on that leg of the trip with that sleeper ticket you bought...) People HATE this type of bait-and-switch, and with ZERO competition even allowed, Amtrak has never had ANY incentive to up their game and make American rail passenger service anything but a novelty other than in the "Acela corridor" (the all-important Washington DC to New York City routes used by media people and politicians who Amtrak must keep happy).

5. America is criss-crossed with rails built in the era of the steam locomotive. Nobody is willing to spend the money to convert all that to rails that can handle true high speed trains. There are also too many crossings and the right-of-way in many places is too narrow for either an upgrade, or adding new parallel rails. Where the rails are no longer being used for freight, they're generally abandoned, rather than upgraded.

6. There are two separate programs in the US currently operating supersonic test aircraft that generate reduced sonic booms. Both projects aim to enable supersonic airliners. In the referenced article, CNN even admits that plane travel is 1/3 the time of high speed rail, but that gap will INCREASE (favoring planes even more in the American mind) with supersonic airliners if they're finally allowed to operate over CONUS, which appears likely.

7. Americans move their families for career reasons and such more frequently than people in many other countries along with economic shifts partially affected by the differences between various states as politics change taxes and regulations in states relative to each other etc. As a result, travel patterns shift more rapidly than in some other nations. With air travel as the primary people mover, this is easily and cheaply handled (only the planes and airports are affected). With trains, one needs to deal with thousands of miles of rails and rights of way issues to add/move routes.

Now for the exception:

The ONE way for rail to beat air travel, and it certainly COULD if the people invested in legacy rail would get out of the way (or change completely) would be to move to low-pressure or vacuum-tube trains. This could be stuff like Musk's Hyperloops or the older notion of trains in tunnels pumped free of air. In these scenarios, all the advantages of trains beat planes, AND the trains could even go at supersonic (or even hypersonic, which airliners will NEVER do for energy and thermal reasons) speeds with no (or reduced) friction/compression/drag/heating issues. In a tube at vacuum, a train could go far faster than anything but a space plane or a point-to-point Starship, AND there'd be no crossings or right-of-way or eminent domain problems, and no costs for the purchase of vast swaths of land etc. No animal strikes, no derailments, no intersections, no collisions, perfectly designed slopes and curves because the path is not owned by anybody else or used by anything else... the tunnels are a winner. A vacuum tube train underground from LA to NYC that could accelerate half way there and decelerate the second half of the trip with NO speed limit would be a short trip (do the math).