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.

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.

Power has been concentrated and that power wants this. It absolutely is inevitable; however, it is not stable or maintainable, so it will fail. VERY DISASTROUSLY, but it will fail just as inevitably as it will arrive.

Centralized power is the goal. Yes, it can and will be abused, but it is worth it. There will finally be complete control! Hurray!

This is a post-law world bro. What is written on paper is only useful as toilet paper now.

Not if there is an agenda to serve: In this case, reliance on society/removal of individual freedom.

There will not be a "next administration". It is "Republicans" until the USA legally crumbles. Technically, the USA has already fallen. When an administration does not respect its own rules, that is the end of the identity of that nation.

It is in the hands of the owner. The problem is that you think the person who purchased it is the owner. That is patently not true. The owner is the one who can turn off the car whenever they wish. The owner is the one who can track the car whenever they want. The owner is the one who controls all of the logs.

Just because you "purchased" it, that does not make you the owner. Same with every other device you have like a phone or a computer. You are merely paying a one-time rental fee to use it, you do not actually own it. Expect that one time fee to become a recurring fee soonish.

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.

*glances at Enron

Actually, that sounds truly brilliant. Let's raise the legal requirements so that happens...

In the USA, a billionaire can and will backdoor your union and make it toothless for the rank and file. An environmental change is needed. The 'system' itself is against the people. To speak more plainly: There is no way to alter the system from within the system as the basic law of the land is bendable to a person's will.

VeraCrypt is a particularly strong full-disk encryption, although you don't hear much of companies using it. However, BitLocker security issues keep getting mentioned and it looks like VeraCrypt fixed a number of theirs. However, code quality seems to be listed as unclear on some sites. Not sure how true that actually is though.

BestCrypt is another, but I'm not happy they permit fragile encryption schemes, as those could potentially be used by the software as standard for something important. Being commercial software, that wouldn't be easy to check.

BitLocker seems to be a typical Microsoft failure in terms of what it does, used only because it's Microsoft and that gives CTOs and CFOs someone to blame.

Why dig a ditch at all if there are no humans around to receive the benefits of it? I REALLY don't think anyone fully thought this through. Let's say that I and a few others receive the full benefits of AI. I don't even like those others, I prefer different types of people... and yet they no longer exist. They had no money for food and shelter and just died off. So I go down to the dance club to meet new people, but there is nobody there. They all died from exposure and starvation.

So I go home and turn on the TV... but all I see is static. There is nobody to make new shows or provide the news. There are no more sports teams to watch. It is just me, 20 thousand other people like me, and none of us like each other and none of want to or are capable of creating music, fine art, etc.

I have spent my entire life thinking other people are Hell... but I found out, too late, that other people make heaven possible.