In America, laws are made by paying the politicians under the table. That's common knowledge. It's how the DMCA got passed, for example. But it's also made by having financially valuable information information, particularly that which permits politicians to have insider information that they can sell for votes/influence or use to make a killing on the stock market.

(You notice anything odd about oil price fluctuations recently?)

Musk had access to money, some of the largest databases the USG had, and the ability to fire civil servants who might have been inconvenient to Congress.

Hmm....only up to about $4 or so here where I live in the New Orleans area...maybe a bit more...I bought at Costco yesterday and didn't really look that close at the pump, but was in the $4 range...

He was in government for how many years? If he wanted the statute of limitations altered, then surely that would have been the time to do it.

It would seem to me that he didn't care about the statute of limitations until AFTER other people started getting rich and he didn't.

I was under the impression that an appeal against a not guilty verdict was not permitted in the US, and was only permissible in the UK in the event of murder when overwhelming evidence showed wilful interference of the trial or exceptional new evidence.

How about we just nuke the Congo?

I partially agree with you, but would like to bring something to your attention. I would say about five countries in the Middle East have been formenting a great deal of trouble for the others, along with a number of terrorist organisations. There is no particular reason to assume that the Middle East will deal with one problem and not the others. Yes, Iran has infuriated a great many countries, none of which (individually) can do much but could collectively act.

We could well see a genuine Middle East Union of nations that simple says enough is enough and clears the deck of all warring parties in the region -- and may well tell the US government that it needs to calm the F down or face a few reprisals of its own. Of course, if it does, then the subcontinent will likely join in - India and Pakistan are closely tied to Iran, and I shouldn't need to tell you both are armed with nuclear weapons. This is something the US also needs to consider, if it tries to invade Iran - you don't need missiles to attack a nation that's on the same landmass you're in, you just need trucks and an unsecured route.

Equally, this is a war that has been going on for the past 4,000-5,000 years now without showing much sign of anyone coming to their senses. This might not be enough to push everyone else over the edge. Precisely because several nations with a vested interest are indeed nuclear armed, there may well be a realpolitik view that kicking the collective arses of all of the power abusers in the region carries unacceptable escallation risks.

My hope is that the current wars being fought, all of which are mindboggingly expensive and stupid beyond all possible definitions of sanity, have a similar result as WW1 and WW2 - to push the world governments into saying that they will not tolerate this continued juvenile delinquency, but this time decide to do something effective about it.

The world has become vastly more destabilised with the wars since the 1990s, and I think there's just a glimmer of realisation amongst some of the politicians that they might well have pushed their luck too far.

Exams are a waste.

Rather, you want continuous practice that is also continuous assessment.

But US methods of teaching are also pretty 18th and 19th century. They are not sensible methods and result in students who are more advanced than the material being penalised. The US obsession with standardising is a recipe for subnormalising.

Maybe itâ(TM)s time we demand an actual online public square for discourse, one thatâ(TM)s free at the point of service and that ideally has the same overhead to value our public roads provide.

And what do you think /. is? Anybody can come here, create an account and post whatever they want, either using their account name or as Anonymous Coward if they want an extra level of obscurity to hide behind. Not only that, the only equivalent of censorship available if you don't like what somebody says is downmodding them, which is the equivalent of booing.

Cars have become ludicrously expensive so that fewer and fewer kids actually have access to them.

Irrelevant. Most of grade school education occurs before students can legally drive.

In 1970, the bottom-of-the-line American Motors car was $2,000 (A VW Beetle $1,839.) Now, a Kia K4 LX is $23,535. In 1970, the median income was $8,900, now it's $84.000. Relatively speaking, a new car is now 25% more expensive than in 1970. That's a shame, but it's a better car and it's not "ludicrously expensive."

Troy, N.Y. is a city, not a town, both by the official standards of New York State and the common understanding of what population constitutes a city. What population is needed to qualify as a small town is fuzzy, but the upper limit might be 1,000 or 2,000.

We can always go into marketing, and if that fails, we can learn telephone sanitizing.

agreed.

the hypocrisy is that Waymo and others are doing just that.

tampering with 'safety' systems (defined by insurance companies and the gov't) will conveniently let the insurance company drop you like a hot potato when someone makes a claim against you.

I'd love to have what you describe...but the realities of liability will never let it happen.

that's only because we cleaned up the air so much you can see the tiny fraction caused by tires.

also, trucks exist.

Hebrew (at least historically, no idea about right now) and Thai for instance have no spaces between words.

I don't know about Thai, but I can assure you from personal experience that even in a Sefer Torah, there are spaces between the words although there aren't vowels. And as far as sounding words out when you've only been taught whole words, I'd imagine that figuring out how to do it on the fly can be rather intimidating if you've never even encountered the idea before, especially if you're not a very good reader, but I'm willing to be proven wrong on that point.