Talking about the President reading briefs shouldn't be a question. Yet, it reportedly is for this President. What I have seen reported is that he doesn't have the patience or reading ability to do the reading in order to make an informed decision. He relies on bullet pointed summaries that better not go over one or at most two pages. If correct, that is wrong for any sitting President.

I don't think that any person would debate that the issues the President is addressing are potentially very real. Foreign chips, dependence on foreign suppliers for critical items, and probably even a very small number of products in trade should indeed be handled. But the ways he goes about solving them are shortsighted and wrong. There are very few companies which are going to do much more than lip service to claim they are investing in America, and hope that saner heads in 2028 will prevail and they can get back to business. Nobody in America wants to pay for what "Made in America" as opposed to at most "Assembled in America" would cost them. They're having troubles making ends meet as it is and are perfectly happy buying "Made Elsewhere".

I'm a Republican, by the way, and proud to say I have never voted for Trump. I also haven't voted for candidates who are rabidly pro Trump at the federal level either. For state offices, there frequently isn't a choice as many times there may just be one Republican candidate on the ballot and a slot for a write-in. But Congress needs to find their collective spines that they were issued at birth and rein in the idiocy spewing from the White House.

More likely, they're producing installations according to the specifications they are given to bid from. In most all municipal jobs, the lowest bidder is going to win. If you bid in all the extra layers that should be there, you'll lose the bid. That isn't the way it should be, but good luck changing the process. If you want to point blame, look to the people writing the specifications for bid.

But also realize that most water and wastewater infrastructure is old. It may be internet connected, but the threat surface was perceived to be much different when those specifications were written. 20/20 hindsight is a great thing. In the early days of the internet, your IP address meant something. Today, with virtual server farms located around the world, they don't mean much. Everything should be written or updated to the security problems we have today. No utility has the money to upgrade - they're just trying to build out more infrastructure to serve more people that needs to be compatible with the existing SCADA system - not a new and improved SCADA system that is more resilient.

Most of the long distance stuff was done over radios. They had line of sight issues, failed frequently, had their own security issues, and dealt with congested spectrum. Sometimes it was dial up, but the telephone companies are abandoning analog as fast as they can. You have to go through hoops to handle phones in elevators compared to the old days.

They certainly should be doing better internet security. But the old technology had lots of problems as well. Combine that with the need to do remote security in many spots, requiring live video feeds sent back to logging devices and running a separate radio or dial up connection for data is a very hard sell.

It has been a while since I visited Canada, and then, it was a couple of provinces in western Canada. But at that time, French was very much a Quebec province thing. Yes, there are scattered patches elsewhere, primarily in areas near Quebec. Implying French is universal in Canada just because it is predominant in Quebec is just wrong. And to be fair, the hostility between western provinces and Quebec has been real for a very long time. At least it was the times I was there.

I loved the people I met and have great respect for Canada. I'm not a fan of the current US leader's desire to annex everything to get everyone's attention off of his family business dealings, or many of his other ideas for that matter. There are many in western Canada that would like to be independent, at the very least from the eastern provinces. I'm pretty sure they wouldn't want to join the US, especially as poorly run as the government has been lately. But ignoring the leadership issues, the people of western Canada have a lot more in common with the people of the upper midwest and western US than they do with Quebec.

At work (all at one company) - work built 6502 based systems, Kaypros, UNOS with serial terminals, Xenix, SCO Openserver, Linux, and eventually Linux with Windows running as a virtual on rare occasions for me. Don't get me wrong, we're mostly Windows based, but as the licensing changes, there's a lot of regret there as well and we see many more attempts to move what can be moved off of Windows. I don't make use of any Windows software, so I'm fine with my Linux box. I can administer all of the Linux servers just fine from it.

At home - UNOS with serial terminal, SCO OpenServer with a Windows box, then Linux for the last couple of decades (not counting gaming consoles).

I'm a LaTeX fan, and find Kile works well for editing, or really any text editor in a pinch. If the packages that allow picture insertions at random spots in the text were better, there would be no competition. Floating figures can also be a trial. They've improved a lot over the years, and there may well be more modern packages that I'm not aware of, but that aspect is the most annoying to me. Still not enough of a problem to go back to the roff suites or to mess around with Microsoft.

I love the tables of contents, list of equations, figures, graphs, glossary options, and the like. Equation creation and display is pretty nice. And when all is done, you get something that looks like it came out of a book publisher, in most cases. If HTML would ever get hyphenation of capitalized words enabled by default, so multi column looked better, it would be a close second to LaTex for content delivery looking good, at least if you didn't need to ever print the document.

A lot of important packages are available with backports from closer to the development branches that can be installed on the last stable version and will be updated as soon as considered moderately stable. Use backports when available if you need something more recent than the version shipped. They don't cover everything, but there are many backported packages.

I'm a Republican. I haven't voted for Trump or his particular sycophants. Although rare, it is possible to be a member of a political party but still vote for who you feel is going to do the best job in the respective office, regardless of party. If the party doesn't like how I vote, they should get better candidates.

Trading on insider information is illegal, but it's also hard to spot. I'd think if all the world brokerages got together and examined all trades within a couple of related connections to each Congressman, it would be illuminating. Congressmen may be under scrutiny. Their grandson's wife? Their sister-in-law's son? Probably not so much. Just look at the Trump family connections, new Trump Towers, all his crypto currency, and on and on.

Guess I should have specified blind trust or some such instead of just saying turning it over to a financial advisor.

As far as who is doing the trading - I suppose it depends on the Congressman. Some seem to not have much actual work product to show for their time in office, so they certainly have time to do it themselves if they wanted. After all, buying or selling a stock online takes well under a minute. And if you were going to do insider trading, I'd think the fewer people who were aware of it, the better.

Trading on inside information should be illegal. Unfortunately, most members of Congress have large stock portfolios before they enter office. What's your plan? Make them turn it all over to a financial advisor? I'm not clear how that would completely eliminate the issue. A Congressman can still see something in the works that could in general drop the stock market or cause it to rise. For the former, they can just suddenly need some money for personal needs and ask the advisor to sell some stock to raise X. Pretty tough to track. Having a "windfall" and turning money back over to the financial advisor before a rise - also hard to track.

If they were going to be in office for only one term, it might be fine. If they are in office for 40 years, cutting out the ability to manage the family wealth would be an unfair burden on the family. Lots of these people have generational wealth. I'm not sure it would be a bad thing to just put in the restrictions and give them a severe disincentive to run for office. But the offset risk is if relatively poorer candidates are the only ones who choose to run, they can be bought more easily. Also not a good outcome.

Counter battery fire systems might say differently.

Historically, every advance in offensive capability gets matched by an advance in defensive capability. Hypersonic missiles are no different. It remains to be seen how the systems currently deployed or under development/trials will handle the advances in missile technology, but rest assured nothing is insurmountable when it comes to defense spending.

Oil prices spiked during Biden's term due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine to around $127/bbl, but were back to around $80/bbl at the end of his term (inflation adjusted figures). You can't blame Biden for the Russian invasion. The price per barrel is now above when Trump took office.

If you have insurance of any form, you already are. Sorry to break it to you.

Universal healthcare doesn't have to mean the government pays for it. I'd be perfectly happy with government simply handling the insurance side of it and making it mandatory for everyone, rolling all the existing government programs into it (VA, Medicare, Medicaid) and giving everyone say the option of Silver, Gold, or Platinum levels of care to choose from with limited ability to switch between the plans on a health event (benefits phased in, premiums phased out on switch for a long enough interval so people would have to pay for what they really need all the time or cover what insurance didn't cover themselves), and then adjust the premiums for everyone each year based on what the expenses were and actuarial analysis projected for the next year. Let them buy out the existing insurance plans based on some previous date to implementation so investors wouldn't be out anything, letting them adjust their taxes to handle any difference between the date the assets and liabilities were examined industry wide with the snapshot for the buyout price and when they transferred assets.

The medical establishment would win because of single payer and knowing exactly what they could do based on three plans. Let people pay for more if they need something special that wasn't covered by their insurance. The people would have less confusing crap to wade through, and wouldn't have to deal with insurance companies at all. Just pay the premiums every month for yourself and your family.

Actually, the Bible provides little context of the life of Ananias and Sapphira. Only their choice to withhold some of the profits from the sale of possessions and lying about it are really detailed. What they were doing and saying that caused the issue to be brought before the church isn't stated, but there had to be something about their lives that made them stand out and brought them in for judgment in the first place. We just aren't told what that was.

Forgiveness was always an option for them. They could have admitted what they had done and asked forgiveness and God would have been fine with that. They willingly chose another course, not realizing what the consequences would be. That was true for both of them.

That's the problem with so many people in the world and throughout history. They live their own lives the way they want, assuming that when they get old they can make things right with God, assuming they even believe He exists. But the day of death isn't cast in stone. It can happen much earlier than we think it will - or we can be in an accident and end up in a coma or get a degenerative brain disease or have a stroke or any number of things that make it impossible to process thought and make things right before the actual end happens.

The Christians then, and Christians today in many countries, live at risk of unexpected death at the hands of man. Certainly the percentage of Christians at risk then was probably higher than it is now. Ananias and Sapphira made a choice, and they ended up dying early for it. I'm not sure that God expects anyone to be "perfect", even after salvation. But He does expect us to ask for forgiveness when the Holy Spirit convicts us. I'm sure the Holy Spirit was dealing with both of their hearts. It's one of the things He does. But the Bible also says that judgment starts in His own house. He expects more from His people.

Lying about what they had done was wrong. But so was whatever wasn't stated in the Bible about how they were living that brought them under scrutiny in the first place. That's likely the more major issue, not that one sin is worse than the other. And the important thing is, ALL sin separates us from God. It doesn't matter a bit what our opinion of the severity of the sin was. Both of these people had grown up in the Jewish culture and religion and would have been well aware of this fact. Throughout Jewish history, God was consistent. Merciful for a time as the people fell away from Him... and then He judged. I'm sure that throughout their history there were thousands and thousands who said what I was doing wasn't any different than what my parents or friends did - why did He have to stop our party now.

God was starting a new church and a new religion and wanted it started on a different and stronger basis, while still reminding the people that He hadn't changed and that sin was still sin. That church has had a lot of issues throughout time as various people have failed God. I'm sure some more Ananias and Sapphira moments would straighten some of that out. But God would be judged just as harshly for such actions if He did more immediate judgments today.