* Illegal immigrants are immigrants.
* Legal immigrants are immigrants.
* In the USA, immigrants (legal or illegal) have kids at a higher rate than citizens. This is what I said in my OP, and it was true then and is still true now.
* A high or low birth rate is neither good nor bad by itself, though the effects of a certain birth rate can have good or bad effects of many parts of life/culture/economy/etc.

The birth rate has been declining for a long time, and has many reasons. However, the declining birth rate has declined less because of immigration (since, again, immigrants have more kids on average). The current administration has deported many immigrants, both legal and illegal immigrants. This will make the (already low) birth rate decline quickly.

Does this make sense? Do you disagree with any piece of this? Because it sounded like you disagreed with my point, despite my comments being accurate for all immigrants regardless of their legal status.

The current administration has deported quite a few legal immigrants who entered properly and were working with work visas or green cards, or were waiting for citizenship. So yeah, "nobody minds legal immigrants" is willfully ignoring what conservatives are saying and deporting in 2025/2026. Do you consume non-partisan media? Because that's important.

Nope, ICE and bigotry. Immigrants have more kids than citizens on average. If it weren't for immigrants, the US birth rate would have been below replacement for years. Bigots know this, so in their fear and hatred they try to racially cleanse us by deporting honest workers and denying birthright citizenship.

Bigots gonna bigot, but we don't need to elect them.

And this tells me that you've never had to find replacement parts for a 25 year old car. I had a '95 motorcycle in the shop for an entire summer trying to get parts for the shaft drive.

Dedicated e-readers are generally designed to work closely with a particular company's servers, and keeping that code running is very expensive. I suppose they could let the code run without maintenance, so that it would either fail someday with zero warning (which people would complain about) or cause massive security issues (which people would complain about). I'd love eternal tablets that work forever with magical fairy dust, but in the real world, 14 years for a device with an expected 5-year lifespan is pretty damn good.

Huh. Many of the paperbacks I bought in the 90s are yellowing and the paper is cracking. The paperbacks from the 70s that I 'inherited" from my siblings (when I moved away from my parents) are all in bad shape. Nothing against paper, but a single-minded "paper good, four legs bad" mindset is just as bad as the opposite single-minded view.

I'm not always a fan of Amazon and their policies, but I gotta respect a 14 year support window for portable devices.

DEI (Diverse Energy Infrastructure) is truly evil and anti-american!

I see the problem. "You cannot reason a person out of a position they did not reason themself into in the first place." Well, the "anyone with the slightest understanding" part is a problem too.

When you've decided that Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt are your logic, you become the perfect servant of grifters.

Errr... what?

There are still unencrypted services (less now than in the past, but you can always bet on vendor laziness and/or incompetence). And in the past "telnet" was my frontline debugging tool.

You are talking about different things. The telnet client is useful (though there are better replacements these days). The telnet server "telnetd" should be taken out back and shot. Then the person who enabled it, if they are still alive, should also be taken out back and shot. Sure, sure, "legacy devices on secured subnets", but TFA talks about servers accessible from the internet.

And I say this as someone who set up many telnetd servers, and continued using them with kerberos auth for a while. But I also pissed off my co-workers by requiring sshd everywhere ~3 decades ago, and turning off telnetd as soon as it was reasonable.

Can't wait for the opportunistic lawsuits "the soulless self-driving car closed the door on my arm! Gimme a $billion!" Sometimes the easy fixes are less easy than you think!

I see an article mentioning 450k rides per week for Waymo. Something which happens once a day is quite rare but also common. Large numbers are weird that way, and it's good evidence that beyond a thousand or so, people are bad at truly understanding large numbers.

At the time, there were people who styled their hair to match Iceman (Val Kilmer with bleached short spiky hair), so presumably there was such a person behind in the line.

Top Gun was a fun movie for teenagers, of the "if you take this at all seriously it will collapse under its own weight" type.

Oh, I know that, and you know that. But as always it comes down to identity politics. And someone who has made "gun owner" not just a description but a critical part of their identity is very threatened by the concept that the second amendment was one of the many compromises given to slave owners.

So in this case I approached them with their own words "I'm protecting you against govt tyranny" and pointing out that cheering on Masked Government Jackbooted Thugs is an odd way to do that. Will it make them think? Probably not; better men than I have tried to get those neurons firing. But we do what we can.

I agree 100%, and I do not and never will own firearms. But the idea behind the Second Amendment was that if our government ever became evil, sending jackbooted thugs to punish and kill people who the govt didn't like, then the Second Amendment would save us.

Sadly, with masked govt agents breaking into houses without judicial warrants, handcuffing kindergartners in class, and killing peaceful protestors, the 2A folks have shown that they are all Team Government Jackbooted Thug. Just about everyone who said "I need guns to defend against a tyrannical govt" have been shown to be a weak mewling whiner who has the backbone of their TACO god.

Kinda like how we have the flawed but still useful VPPA not because certain folks believe in privacy. We have it because certain weak mewling whiners cared about THEIR privacy, but couldn't pass a bill that protected only weak mewling whiners.