Read the click-bait article carefully. They are not saying real ID is unreliable, they are saying a real ID card can be forged. When there is suspicion of a forged document it can take longer to verify its authenticity.

That has actually been proposed but the physics of it don't work. To make the cable strong enough to resist the extremely high winds it becomes too heavy to get it up the mountain side.

Many commenters don't understand how dangerous the trash removal is. There are human bodies near the summit which haven't been removed.

After a little research drones are likely the answer. They already have them working up to 20,000ft. With more R&D it is possible to make drones which work at the summit and still have lift capacity. Many people are already flying camera drones at the summit.

Pay to have extra sherpas bring up balloons with bags. The balloons have built in thermal source to heat them enough to loft them (or use some other scheme). Launch waste balloons when the wind in the right direction for them to float to the lower elevations. Pay the locals to retrieve them and dispose of the trash. It is slow process but over time it can reduce the waste near the top. Might even be able to optimize with a radio command to drop immediately when over the right area; radio command pops the balloon. These aren't toy balloons. Use balloon which can loft 30-40lb.

This will be cloned in China before they even ship it. Is it for sale on Aliexpress yet?

Pointless link to a paywalled article.

It's really an opinion question, is AI going to dramatically alter the web or not? No one knows the answer to that. All that we do know is that AI is disrupting a lot of things and the web may end up being one of them. So depending on how you feel about AI that day, your answer can differ.

I don't think that is correct. The FAB in AZ is their fallback position if Taiwan is lost.

I googled something like net worth of US billionaires and that was what came out on top. I was looking for the the $6.72T number, not the count of the billionaires, that count varies everyday be cause many up them are right at the $1B line. A strong up/down day in the market can change the number by 30.

My point is that even if you took every penny the billionaires have and passed it out to the general population you are only going to get a one time check for $17.920. And if they have to pay taxes first that one check will be closer to $14,000. Even though billionaires are extremely rich they are still nothing much when compared to the size of the overall US economy. The pandemic stimmie checks were of similar size and they weren't life changing.

People compare themselves one to one with a billionaire and feel very poor. But look at it collectively, if you confiscated everything the billionaires have they could only pay off the US deficit for about 18 months before they collectively went broke. And then we'd still have a giant deficit without anyone to tax. It's just a fantasy to think that taxing the billionaires can close the deficit or provide free healthcare for all. Use you brain and a calculator, it can't possibly work. Sure, make them pay more in taxes, but it isn't going to dramatically change things.

I just copied the quote and didn't edit it.

"According to Forbes, there were 868 U.S. billionaires as of 2025, holding a combined wealth of $6.72 trillion as of the end of 2024, a decrease from the 813 reported by Forbes in its April 2024 list but with increased overall wealth. The United States has the most billionaires globally, with these individuals concentrated in states like California, New York, Florida, and Texas."

$6.72T / 375 milllion (population of USA) == $17,920 per person.

Amazon has flooded DC with lobbyists trying to get De Minimus repealed. Analysts estimate ending De Minimus will increase Amazon sales by $22-25B. It is also generates instant profit for Amazon since Amazon charges a blanket 15% finder fee. It the a vendors pays $100 in tariffs Amazon adds their 15% right on top of that taking an addition $15 for doing absolutely nothing. Analyst estimate for that markup effect is an increase in $1.5B/yr in Amazon profits.

In the larger picture most economist are predicting a major substitution of goods purchases to service purchases which are not tariffed. In other words, a lot of people will simply stop buying these trinkets and instead travel, go to sports, concerts, etc.

This universal crawler would just copy everything verbatim and compress it with standard compression. It would then be up to the subscribers to process it into their own internal formats.

This is not a cheap thing to build, the central repository is going to need several billion dollars worth of storage. So the fees to join the group will be in the $250M range or more. But you'd have to spend that much on your own crawler so there's no loss.

Before you run off saying 'sign me up' note that each empty exabyte of storage costs about $100M to buy.

Consider how this would work for a new AI entrant. They'd pay to join the repository collective and then the repository will ship them an array of disks with exabytes of data to get them started. No need to crawl at all. Over time that exabyte array will be remotely updated with newly crawled content. Once they have the exabytes of data in their data center they can copy it out at very high speeds. A complete snapshot of the entire internet is zettabytes, I don't believe anyone has a complete snapshot.