a doozie to debug

It's more a case of the fox being in charge of the chicken coop; or bank robbers gaining control of the bank.

The job of the press in a democracy is to hold officials up to scrutiny.

Well? How do you expect a DC politician to become a MILLIONAIRE, on just a less than $200,000 a year salary, while living in an expensive place like the DC/Virginia area, while also having a residence in their district back home. It's expensive and those poor politicians are working hard for their people back home (yes, sarcasm). They start off in a small town city council, then move up to a state congress. Then if term limited out, they run for state senate. If that goes well, they sometimes run for state governor. After that they move up to "the big league". Once there, you can bet they get pulled into whichever party boss they are assigned to and told welcome to DC. Here's how things work. DO what we say, VOTE how we tell you to vote and you will get rich beyond your wildest dreams. Go against us, and you'll be gone by the next election. "but what about the people in my district?" No worry, we'll throw you a bone once in a while, so you can record it so it can be played on your local tv stations. The entire DC area is corrupt, doesn't matter which party you subscribe to.

Oh, they'll be found guilty. "Forced" to pay a fine of a BILLION dollars! Boy! That will show em! LOL, they make that much money EVERY DAY, and then some!

It's the bottom of the world. Less fuel required. You just cut the rope and they will fall into orbit! LOL

the deflock.org site which I started watching about a month ago, showed less than 100 towns/cities that abandoned Flock. Now it's over 150 that have told flock to go flock off. Two towns in my neck of the woods have covered the cameras with black garbage bags and said they are canceling their contract and returning the money flock paid them to put the cameras in their towns.

Get rid of the 3,494 sensors, computer control garbage and it would make vehicle more affordable in two ways. One, less expensive to purchase and two, less expensive TO REPAIR!

Ahhhh...seems like yesterday that people were saying "cut the cord", drop cable and STREAM! It's cheaper! LOL, those days are over!

Actually, Trump is not a singular cause. He was not the first. Back under reagan, he killed a great deal of our civilian oriented R&D saying that private business can do it , while moving some to DARPA. Thankfully, DARPA still funded basic science.
Then W did more cuts, but pushed a lot of DARPA spending in UNI over to companies and forced cuts in basic science.
Biden also did major changes and pushed funding to go from merit based to DEI.
Trump is just a continuation of this and not even the worst ( reagan or W were the worst ).

The logic is economic autarky -- the belief that we're always better off having complete political sovereignty over every part of our supply chains than having to depend on imports for anything.

This is likely also behind Trump's trade war with Canada. His demands with Canada aren't about discirimatory tariffs -- those were negotiated away with NAFTA then re-negotiated in his first term. His demands are now infringe on Canadian sovereignty, to give US control of Canada's external trade policy, and even on its internal markets (e.g., the use of French in Canadian internal commerce). Symbolically, that's why he wants to rename Lake Ontario to "Lake America". HIs establishment of US control over the Venezuelan oil industry is his greatest foreign policy achievement -- although it's not clear he understands the legal limits on what he can do with their money.

There's a foreign and military policy angle to this too: Taiwan is absolutely critical to the US economy, so we are absolutely committed to defend them if China invades. Semiconductor autarky would mean it's not our problem.

The problem with autarky is that even if it's a good idea (which economists don't believe), you can't conjure it into existence overnight. It will take many years, possibly decades for the US to replace the Taiwan's semiconductor industry. In effect, the administration is proposing to inflict the very damage on the US economy that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would inflict.

And, once the US has voluntarily self-inflicted that damage, China would be free to invade Taiwan.

https://www.cs.wisc.edu/2025/0...

And DARPA has a whole program for it:

https://www.darpa.mil/research...

No one is going to visit a website they can't even pronounce let alone spell.

Then, all the food was "whole food". Today, everything is pre-processed junk!

They've invested too much into these things. The pushback against the data centers will cause them to be built in China. If you look on Google Earth 3625'27.62"N 9510'39.07"E, 36 3'56.04"N 10026'32.58"E, 3722'42.20"N 9713'20.76"E, That's just the three I've found so far. Couple have a solar mirror generator too. Also, two of the three have a huge reserve of water available. If the pushback continues, you can bet China will welcome the AI Data centers with open arms.

Its a paid feature. You don't get it for free.

We have had access to this in Canada for a long time but it is ridiculously overpriced so I don't pay for it.