Legitimate weapons of war, like missiles, are properly placed on land-based MILITARY vehicles, sea-based MILITARY vessels, and MILITARY aircraft, which are clearly marked as military and with a nationality. This makes the situation obvious to any observer (friend or foe) and helps remove ambiguity from situations that might otherwise easily spiral out of control. Such systems can be observed, analyzed, counted, and regulated by arms treaties.

By developing missiles that would be camouflaged in standard shipping containers, the Chinese are placing themselves into WWII German territory...using apparently civilian vessels of commerce, which are actually armed warships in drag. The whole thing goes from nasty to global chaos when the people creating such stuff sell it on the open market to any belligerent who wants it, thus making ALL merchant vessels into suspected terrorist vessels. Nothing good can come of this.

The only appropriate response would be for every civilized nation to ban Chinese containers and container vessels from entering their waters and ports.

Is this "new and improved" Chinese military tech going to out-perform the junk they equipped Iran with before the current conflict? THAT stuff was NOT the bargain-basement consumer-grade TEMU stuff this is, and that higher-grade stuff failed utterly.

Have you bought stuff from China? Most of their vendors are about the initial sale with little regard to follow-up sales... so quality is generally not their "thing"

There's a general global failure to appreciate just how insanely capable most American platforms are. Most were developed during the Cold War (to fight the Soviets) or developed post Cold War with the rules and patterns developed during that conflict. One of the keys of US weapons development during that period was a near-paranoia about the quality and quantity of Soviet equipment. I know this first-hand. American Intel agencies were not nearly as good as they (and the other parts of the government that relied on them) thought they were. As a result, American systems were designed to fight much larger numbers of Soviet stuff than actually existed, AND much higher quality Soviet stuff manned by much better Soviet troops than actually existed. I personally had a security clearance that was high enough for me to see certain info on what we were sure the Soviets had (in a naval context) and I was stunned after the Soviet Union dissolved and things opened up to see that the info I'd seen as "certain" was in fact certainly completely WRONG. (and, NO, I'll not provide any details). My point is that Americans believing our most likely enemy in the next shooting war was much more capable than he was, combined with the post Pearl Harbor American paranoia about sneak attacks and being drawn into a conflict unprepared, led to a whole paradigm of weps designs the rest of the world does not yet fully grasp. We simply over-studied, over-planned and then over-designed everything at great cost. No other nation on Earth has done anything close to that.

Oh, and a little note about all the "hypersonic missile" scares: It suits certain defense contractors very well to have congress and voters think the US is behind in hypersonics and needs to spend billions on R&D to catch-up with this or that boogeyman enemy. To hear these people talk, you'd think China and Russia are WAY ahead of us in understanding flight in this aerospace regime, and we need to be spooked, like we were by Sputnik (and thus fire the money canon, showering them with cost-plus contracts of course). In truth, the US understands hypersonic flight vehicles better than any other nation on Earth, and the evidence has been right before everybody's eyes for DECADES. Look back to the X-15 flights (in one of which Neil Armstrong flew out of the atmosphere long before becoming an Astronaut and going to the moon) which were not small unmanned missiles but actually large manned planes that flew at hypersonic speeds. Then, for DECADES, right on TV for everybody to see, the US flew Space Shuttles (hypersonic manned vehicles the size of small airliners), with every single flight beginning its landing glide at Mach25, and every flight heavily instrumented. Tests were being performed on things like boundary layer tripping on these vehicles right up to the very last flight. That's a MOUNTAIN of data nobody else has, and nobody else has ever even had a way to obtain. Then, of course, we're not even talking about classified programs, which are ALWAYS going on in the US....

We live in a world where people avoid thinking about the most important things and fantasize about becoming millionaires or billionaires. Who hasn't thought about how great their lives would be if only they had a billion dollars? Money is certainly helpful. It enables one to do many things and it helps reduce all the little concerns of life, but it cannot remove the big hazards, and indeed people with mountains of the stuff gain lots of other problems along with it (like security concerns, and difficulty knowing if people like THEM or just their money). Money buys a lot, but not everything, and often not the most important things.

Paul Allen... death by cancer

Steve Jobs... death by cancer

This guy... same thing

People have often warned that "you can't take it with you" and "you never see a U-Haul trailer on towed by a hearse" and these do make a point. What's also true, however, is that even mountains of money often cannot solve particular problems while one is alive. Keep things in perspective, and don't waste time on things like envy.

The filings used to be semi-annual, and people in BOTH parties have long wondered if the shift to quarterlies was a contributing factor in the shift to short-term thinking in corporate board rooms. Nobody will admit it, but nobody knows for sure. Switching to semi-annual is NOT some weird revolutionary thing; it's a reversion to the way things used to be. Sadly, we'll never know for sure if if it matters since any change in corporate board room behavior which correlates with this change back will likely be clouded by other matters. Complexity is always the enemy of the simple-minded.

Probably the only real shake-out from this change will be a reduction in paperwork and government-mandated man-hours of busy work for accountants and execs.

If it HAD been politicians, it would have had SOME legitimacy. Elected representatives are supposed to be the ones writing laws, and elected executives are supposed to be the ones signing laws into existence and then ordering their officers to enforce those laws. THAT is called "accountability" in a supposedly representative democracy. If the politicians in the legislature or the executive make the voters angry, they get voted out - held accountable. The Democrats who dominate Sacramento want these policies to make their political base ecstatic, but they wanted ZERO responsibility - when the citizenry got hit with the accumulation of the effects of all these policies, they wanted to be able to tell the tar-and-feather bearing and pitchfork-carrying outraged masses that "somebody else did it...it wasn't ME!"

THIS was nothing of the sort. This was an un-elected bunch of people in an org setup by politicians who specifically wanted to NOT be accountable, whose identity is unknown to 99.999% of the citizenry, and who the citizens cannot punish in ANY way. These illegitimate clowns were effectively plotting "in the dead-of-night" (i.e. almost no voters in the entire state knew it was happening no matter the time displayed on the clock) to wreck the lives of millions of people, in pursuit of a political ideology most of those people do not hold. I'm hyper-aware of politics compared to everybody I personally know, and I did not know this was underway. The opportunity for comment on these regs reminds me of the process Douglas Adams came up with for his Arthur Dent character to encounter. Remember: these un-elected BUREAUCRATS (NOT elected politicians) were going to put rules in place that would be enforced as though they were laws... this entire scheme (like the federal version which we've had too much of for nearly a century) is a work-around for legitimate law making.

If supporters of such policies want them here in CA, they can jolly-well do them a more democratic way: either get the legislature and governor to do them, or put them on the ballot for the voters themselves as a proposition.

Let's see the argument be HONEST. NO cost-shifting, no differential energy rates, no cost-shifting, etc. To be truly honest about the costs and benefits, there should be ZERO Marxist schemes to shield some people from the policy costs while shifting the burdens to others. No subsidies for NatGas, BUT ALSO no subsidies of any sort for wind or solar. We can all go fully electric, in a state that eliminated coal and nearly all nuclear, and now is always short of electricity and importing from other states... and anybody earning less than 6 figures will be unable to afford heating their homes in winter or having hot water for laundry, baths, and showers. At the very time to CA government was dishonestly working on this stealth policy, the politicians were demanding everybody switch to electric cars and working to scale energy costs to a person's annual income!

While we're on the subject of the liars running this state: where were they planning to use the money from the "added fees"? Apparently tax dollars lower the planetary temperature no matter what China and India do, and no matter how those funds are spent. Our CA politicians are so tax-happy that when they implemented a mandatory 10 cents per bag fee at grocery stores, they forgot to say where the money should go... it became a bit of a joke out here. Initially the grocers were collecting the bag fee and just keeping it because they had no where to send it, and no requirement to send it.

Lenin and Stalin had nothing on these pigs. There's NOTHING more evil and corrupt than un-elected ideologue bureaucrats actively working to undermine civilization.

Let's see here...

I need a surgeon to do a bypass operation... should I choose:
[a] A board-certified surgeon who went to med school, did his internship, etc, has actually operated on peoples' hearts (initially under the supervision of an experienced older surgeon),
-or-
[b] the homeless dude who sleeps in the McDonalds parking lot, but who at the moment has been given an operating room with a nurse, a laptop, and ChatGPT.

yeah, I know, TOUGH CHOICE! Remember: one of these two people actually LEARNED what's inside a person and a little bit about where things are and how they work...

I am becoming increasingly convinced that somebody is placing those Futurama Brain Slugs onto people and everybody is left murmering about AI...

AI is NOT intelligence and it NEVER will be. AI does not KNOW [in the grok sense] ANYTHING. AI not only has ZERO judgement, it's never even going to be CAPABLE of having any. Oh, it will get better and better at SIMULATING these things in order to fool the stupid... but it will never HAVE these things. It certainly had better get mighty impressive at SIMULATING these things and fooling people, given the BILLIONS of dollars being poured into it. AI is certainly useful as a TOOL. It'll eventually probably layout all circuit boards, plan all CNC tool paths, optimize vehicle trajectories and engine combustions, fine-tune airfoil and ship hull designs, etc. but will do these things without actually being intelligent.

The very idea that anybody would push the idea presented here is near the absurdity horizon. It misses the entire point about what it is to be educated, or indeed to even be human. Indeed, if AI will do all the thinking, and AI will do all the future coding, up to and including coding newer AI, then just WHAT is the proposed purpose for the continued existence of people at all? Idiocracy and The Marching Morons are starting to look optimistic. All hail President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho!

First off: Where in the hell did anybody get the idea that a web browser is for anything other than browsing the web???

OK, got that bit off my chest...

There's a serious disease infecting all the young coders in geekyland these days. It's name is AI. It seems that anybody who graduated with a computer related degree within the past decade or two now presumes [WRONGLY] that everything needs AI injected into it. It's like all the younger programmers are those stupid dancing syringe characters from Colbert's show in the COVID era, except they're trying to inject AI rather than a vaccine.

There's probably some Wall Street bubble action here, with every manager and CEO thinking they can get the stock price of their enterprise up by telling people their team is using AI and their products are powered by or enhanced by AI, etc. but it's programmers actually putting all this cruft into everything.

Once AI is in a browser, is it safe to use the browser for things like banking? Are all my passwords and financial details going to get fed into some database and someday start appearing on billboards in phony vistavision movies on YouTube? [wondering]. The people playing with AI are seemingly completely oblivious to the sorts of concerns they are creating. Even the people with the best possible AI intentions are going to inherit the reputations of the people doing the worst things with AI, and people NEED to be able to trust things like web browsers.

The very LEAST a company can do, assuming they cave-in to the AI thing like lemmings running to the cliff, is make it so users can easily fully disable it, Which Mozilla is apparently doing. I shut it all off when updating my browser, but I'm not sure I trust them to obey my orders, or to preserve the option in future releases - I remember when you could switch-off Javascript in Firefox and it was REALLY handy in certain situations. I suppose we could ask the AI support bot at Mozilla if this ability to disable will always be there... and it might even confirm that promise. I think Dave always assumed the pod bay doors would open when he needed them to... Now, with the AI stuff switched off, can I recover the disc space, or is the bloat there even with functionality disabled? asking for a friend... I'm starting to think I should have brought my space helmet along on this outing...

American culture is so saturated with tech and belief in science etc, that when combined with the views held among most tech types we have a serious national blindspot: many of us think everything can be solved with a gadget and/or some code. This is apparent everywhere. Cryptocurrency is an attempt to bypass reckless governments manipulating fiat currencies and spying on citizens. Cryptography and blockchain stuff is constantly proposed to fix this or that. Now AI is the tech path to nirvana. The problem is, however, that human societies are full of humans, and humans have human flaws. Code and chips simply cannot fix human stupidity, human laziness, or human evil.

The current push for age verification on the internet SEEMS to be a genuine desire in some to protect kids from some of the worst stuff on the internet. I'll certainly allow that SOME people driving it are doing so out of genuine concern and a desire to "do good". I suspect, however, that there are people desperate to destroy internet anonymity, possibly just to help big corporations better analyze everybody and target them for ads etc, but more likely in the interest of destroying free expression and squashing political opinions they dislike. What better way to censor people than to force everybody identify themselves online? just for the purpose of age verification... for the good of the kiddies, of course.... It's a lot simpler to dox people, get them swatted, or audited, or fired from jobs, etc if they're already identified...

This proposal, as stupid and flawed as it is, is actually the best idea I have seen floated for the idea of age verification only. No personal identification put onto the internet or provided to service providers or vendors etc... just a local age-of-user verification API that apps like the web browser can check with. If this satisfies the people with the do-gooder complexes AND the owner of the system can personally decide the compliance and set the age-of-user info which the API will then provide to the apps, then this is somewhat reasonable. Sort of a parent-decides-for-their-kids thing. As long as that's all it is (but being legislated by lawmakers/lawyers it's likely not and likely won't stay that way). There's a lot to dislike here... This is not what an operating system exists for (it does not mange tasks or resources nor does it abstract the hardware), but it's the best of the bad on offer. Hopefully nobody will tell these lawmakers that APIs can be ignored/bypassed and nobody will point out what many parents learn the hard way: that kids tend to know how to bypass such controls better than parents know how to use them. If the politicians are going to eventually ram-through a "fix", hopefully it will be something like this, rather than all the other worse proposals that have been floated.

At SOME point, people MAY eventually grasp the fact that wires and/or bits cannot fix all human failures. Broken people are not a tech problem. It's the same basic problem as drugs, alcohol, and guns. The inanimate THING is not the issue, human choices and human actions are the issue and are the thing that decides whether a hammer is going to help a carpenter build a beautiful new home, or help a homicidal maniac bash-in somebody's skull.

Changes like this are always more complex than any single item, BUT there is a glaringly-obvious major contributor: The post-NAFTA and post MFN-for-China de-industrialization. Service jobs and retail jobs tend to be during standard daylight business hours, whereas big, expensive, industrial facilities often need to operate around the clock to justify their existence. It's also true that some big industrial facilities require much more than an entire workers' shift just to start-up or shut-down so there's no practical way to have them un-staffed overnight.

Historically, most workers on the night shift worked those hours because they needed the jobs and those jobs (being less desired) tended to be available. Not everything in employment statistics is just about worker preference.

The State Senate is 30 Democrats to 10 Republicans. The state Assembly is 60 Democrats to 20 Republicans. The standard definition of majority rule is anything over 1:1, and the definition of super-majority rule (where the majority can do anything and steamroller their opponents) is 2:1. This is a ratio of 3:1 and at this ratio the majority in CA does not even listen to the questions or opinions of their opponents. ANYBODY with that big of a majority will be corrupted and divorced from reality merely by their total immunity from any questioning of, or challenges to, their ideas and plans.

We in California not only have a no-brakes-on-the-wagon legislature, but the executive branch is in total alignment; here are the constitutional officers of the state:

Governor: Gavin Newsom (Democrat), The Democrats have held this seat since 2010. (15 years)
Lt Governor Eleni Kounalakis (Democrat), The Democrats have held this seat since 1982 with the exception of one year (42 out of 43 years)
Secretary of State: Shirley Weber (Democrat). The Democrats have held this seat since 2007. (18 years)
State Controller: Malia Cohen (Democrat). The Democrats have held this seat since 1975. (50 years)
Treasurer: Fiona Ma (Democrat). The Democrats have held this seat since 1999. (25 years)
Attorney General: Rob Bonta (Democrat). The Democrats have held this seat since 1999. (25 years)
Insurance Commissioner: Ricardo Lara (Democrat). The Democrats have held this seat since 2011. (14 years)
Superintendents of Public Instruction: Tony Thurmond (Democrat). The Democrats have held this seat since 1995. (30 years)

Board of Equalization (seat 1 of 5): Ted Gaines (Republican) . The Republicans have held this rural seat since 2015. (10 years) but before that Democrats held it since 1939
Board of Equalization (seat 2 of 5): Sally Lieber (Democrat). The Democrats have held this seat since 2015. (10 years)
Board of Equalization (seat 3 of 5):Tony Vazquez (Democrat). The Democrats have held this seat since 2015. (10 years)
Board of Equalization (seat 4 of 5): Mike Schaefer (Democrat). The Democrats have held this seat since 2019. (6 years)
Board of Equalization (seat 5 of 5): Malia Cohen (Democrat). The Democrats have held this seat since 1975. (50 years)

Supreme Court Judge (seat 1 of 7): Patricia Guerrero (Democrat, appointed in 2022 - filling a seat previously held by a Republican) This is the Chief Justice
Supreme Court Judge (seat 2 of 7): Carol Corrigan (Republican, appointed in 2006 - filling a seat previously held by a Republican)
Supreme Court Judge (seat 3 of 7): Goodwin Liu (Democrat, appointed in 2011 - filling a seat previously held by a Democrat)
Supreme Court Judge (seat 4 of 7): Leondra Kruger (Democrat, appointed in 2015 - filling a seat previously held by a Republican)
Supreme Court Judge (seat 5 of 7): Joshua Groban (Democrat, appointed in 2019 - filling a seat previously held by a Republican)
Supreme Court Judge (seat 6 of 7): Kelli Evans (Democrat, appointed in 2023 - filling a seat previously held by a Democrat)
Supreme Court Judge (seat 7 of 7): vacant - a Democrat previously held this seat

There is simply no check at all in the state against the current political majority, not even anybody to slow them down and make them justify what they do. This may SEEM good to Democrats reading this info, but it's not healthy and you'd likely be completely freaked-out if the situation were reversed. This sort of unlimited power is what enables a political party to ram-through completely irrational, insane, uninformed, and un-workable policies like this 3D printer idiocy. With less political power, the people in the majority would have to answer challenges to such ideas and in answering those would be forced to learn a bit about what they're legislating about, and in doing so they MIGHT come to a realization of how idiotic the plan is. This is the same governing majority that has now driven most of the oil refineries out of the state (while requiring special fuel blends other states do not make) so we are one minor incident away from gas lines and rationing. These people have also shut down all but one of the nuclear plants, all but one coal plant, several dams, and a bunch of oil and gas plants and they now blame "big oil" for our record high energy costs.

Things which cannot be sustained, will not be. It's a basic law of reality. The 3D printer law proposed is not that big of a deal compared to all the other policies, but it IS an indicator of detachment from reality, and sooner or later the voters will start noticing and social policies people like will not be enough to keep these people in power. It's a lesson all politicians in all parties SHOULD pay attention to.

These are hard FACTS. Anybody modding this "troll" is simply proving they have no honest answer and simply want people to remain ignorant of the situation.

The anti-Trumpers will rant in favor of any and all vaccines and scream that anybody with any skepticism is an irrational "anti-vaxxer", and the people people either opposed to vaccines or skeptical of them will presume Moderna is about to unleash another defecive product and all the people defending it are mindless meatpuppets like Steven Colbert's dudes in syringe costumes...

As in nearly everything these days, the one side has gone so nuts over the Bad Orange Man that they cannot see anything outside that context, and everybody else who disagrees with them on this or that detail is forced to either shut up or APPEAR to be defenders of Trump. This is madness.

I propose a fix, at least for the vaccine issue: The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 needs to be repealed. Before that act passed, drug companies were operational and made profits... it IS in fact possible to do that as history proved. After they screwed-up and were facing a loss of profits, they blackmailed the nation into giving them an immunity, which NO other maker of products has (Not even gun makers, who are immune for liability when their guns function as designed, but still liable if they malfunction). Anybody with an ounce of skepticism about the purity of human beings OUGHT to be at least a little worried by a law that grants a manufacturer complete immunity no matter how bad their product is, even if it is DELIBERATELY bad, not tested, not manufactured properly, etc. It's basic human nature to get lazy over time, cut corners, and not worry about quality or efficacy of a thing if you cannot be punished in the event something goes wrong. Would Moderna roll-out this new Flu vaccine if they had the same liability as a car company, or a restaurant? I'd bet they would either refuse to release it or would do one hell of a lot more testing first. Let's make the drug companies exactly as liable as the gun makers (we could give them the exact same extra protection the gun makers have, which is that if their product kills somebody it was designed to kill then they are not liable, but they are still liable if the product malfunctions and injures or kills a person it was not designed to) which is a step less than making them as liable as the local coffee shop or a part-time pet groomer. If multi-billion dollar Moderna has less confidence in the safety of its new vaccine than Jose has in his little taco stand (an example cited NOT for ethnic reasons, but for size of business and available resources reasons), then maybe that means something...

If the people who are totally on-board with ANYTHING, as long as they think Trump is somehow on the other side, have a problem with this idea (simply returning the vaccine makers to their original liability status just like all the other product manufacturers in our modern society) then they ought to get Trump out of their heads (he'd just not that important in most matters) and start thinking this through without the overlay of politics distorting basic logic. There's a reason why Bill Gates pulled out of computers and went all-in on vaccines where your investments make high returns with ZERO possibility of legal liabilities (NO other investment on Earth has that).

Incidentally, as a US military vet who deployed, I have probably been more vaccinated than 90% of the people on this site, so NO, I'm NOT an anti-vaxxer, though I an indeed skeptical of the COVID-19 stuff (another subject, only tangential to this thread).

The definition of "constitutional" is not "stuff I like" and "unconstitutional" does NOT mean "stuff I don't like". I suspect people raised in the era of "everybody gets a trophy" have this severe disconnect from reality.

The Constitution of The United States says NOTHING about a private business checking to see if a customer has reached the age of majority. The Constitution lays out the structure of the FEDERAL government, explains how people become members of the various entities described, explains the duties of those entities, and explicitly says that anything it does not cover is left to the states and to the people themselves. The Bill of Rights (the first 10 Amendments) then go on to re-state the limits on the powers of the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT, in case some moron could not be bothered to read the Constitution itself and notice those limits. There's NOTHING in there regulating what the states do or what businesses do, or what individuals do in their day-to-day activities. Much later, the Supreme Court, no-doubt with good intentions, decided to rule that the limitations on the Federal government's actions toward citizens were effectively limited if the state or local governments could do things to people that the Federal government couldn't... so they ruled that the Constitutional limits on GOVERNMENT apply to the state and local governments as well.

If some business, or charity, or individual does not want to do things for you without you first showing them your ID, then that's simply your problem. The Constitution is silent on the matter, and thus the requirement (in this case, that you show ID) is perfectly legal.

It's a basic fact of bookkeeping. Everything that is an inflow of resources (money, assets, etc) to a business goes onto one side of the ledger, and everything that is an outflow of resources (money, assets, etc) goes on the other side of the ledger. Taxes, NO MATTER HOW THEY ARE STRUCTURED, go onto the outflow side of the ledger. The prices a company charges for its products or services MUST be large enough to cover ALL the outflow, or else the company goes bust. As a result, the costs for any taxes supposedly levied upon any company (just like the costs of the employees, facilities, energy, raw materials, etc) simply become part of the price of the goods or services sold by that company and are paid for by the customers.

There are multiple reasons people on the right always want to cut taxes on business, and none of those reasons is that it will make some corporate CEO giddy as he rolls around in piles of cash. First, if you cut the taxes on businesses, you lower the expenses and thus can lower prices on customers (this one's not automatic - it only works in a market segment with healthy competitors). Second, if you cut those domestic taxes, it can make doing business within the country easier and more favorable which can lead to businesses on-shoring and improved employment and increased industrial capacity. A conservative-favored side-effect of improved employment is reduced dependency upon government handout programs as average people get improved self-sufficiency and self-respect. Third, if it encourages business to return home, supply chains improve and national vulnerabilities reduce. Fourth, taxation is a generally immoral act, not far removed from armed robbery ("gimme yer money, or else!")

It does not matter one bit that some lying politician whips morons up into a fever pitch over promises to put taxes onto businesses - those taxes will actually be paid by the CUSTOMERS of those businesses. There is NO WAY to avoid this.

Just because a politician promises to tax a business, or write a law elimi9nating gravity, or changing the speed of light, it does not mean he will be able to do it. Basic laws of physics and basic laws of economics are simply inviolable no matter the rhetoric of somebody seeking political power.

Advocates for all kids going to college love to cloud this by citing stats about how much more money college graduates make than non-attenders over their careers, and it's impressive but deceptive. They use these arguments to convince kids to go to college, while then also encouraging them to "follow their passions/interests" and take ANY major. One big problem here is that the in-demand technical majors (the ones that will be hardest to study in college) are distorting the stats. The average kid going off to college is NOT studying to be a surgeon, NOT going to end up as a Principle Engineer at SpaceX or Apple, NOT going to be in a corner office at JP Morgan, or a lobbyist/lawyer in Washington DC etc. All too often, the kids taking the "you MUST go to college" advice are majoring in stuff that will likely NEVER pay off, and the folks in academia pushing all this are making out like bandits as colleges and universities double- and triple-down on the prices knowing full-well that the incoming freshmen have ZERO experience with debt and interest and no real appreciation for what those massive student loans will do to them. It's nice to imagine all the fine people advising the young along these lines are well-meaning and unbiased, but they are HUMANS and as always, "follow the money" is a good idea. The institutions involved have massively increased their non-professor staffs to insane levels, often creating and filling new positions that were never previously needed and contribute ZERO to student success - and SOMEBODY needs to provide the money for those salary and benefit packages.

The stats the kids SHOULD be given are [1] the odds of them graduating with the major they start with (many difficult majors are never completed) [2] the odds of them getting a job with that major, [3] the salary they can expect with a typical job obtained with that degree and the average longevity thereof, [4] The total debt they are likely to incur getting that degree (including not just tuition, but also books, labs, living expenses, additional tutoring and such that typical kids on that track incur) and [5] the likely costs of servicing that debt plus paying it off and the YEARS this will likely take. Some degrees (often the ones that will produce the best jobs) are so difficult/intensive that the student will be unable to hold a job while studying and thus need to finance all their expenses for those years. For those kids who never graduate, or who down-shift to a different/easier major (which may produce lower income results) all the debts will still be there... and most young college-bound kids are not truly equipped to appreciate what that may mean for them. It's not just that they do not truly grok the amounts of money, and effects of interest, they are likely also not equipped to understand how the psychological weight of that debt and the prospect of living under it for many years will affect them. It will also not likely occur to them to think about how difficult it could be to take on additional loans (for things like homes and cars) when banks see how much debt they are already under as they graduate from college. There are many reasons family formation and initial home purchases are getting delayed later and later into peoples' lives, but this stuff is certainly a major factor.

This all went completely out of control when the Obama administration did a federal government takeover of the student loan program. They made it so any kid could get loans, of nearly unlimited sizes, and for any majors... which was OBVIOUSLY going to be inflationary to anybody familiar with the old Law of Supply and Demand. Many of us predicted this and warned about it back at the time, and were were often denounced as "racists" etc on the theory that we just did not want poor black and brown people to be educated. The accusations were vile, and dishonest, and just a way to re-direct away from some very basic economic arguments, which if addressed back then would have spared countless young people of all skin colors and backgrounds a tremendous amount of grief. It's simply not possible to take all the limits off one side of an economic equation and not have really bad things happen. While it was Obama that did it, it was not his color or gender or party that caused this either, it would have gone just as badly had some white Republican female president done it. It was just a combination of economic laws, and human nature, that made this a really bad (and predicted and warned about) idea.

Have you BEEN to a Department of Motor Vehicles? Do you like the IRS? Are you impressed by the financial care you see in Pentagon procurements? The FCC's control of the airwaves? the service of Amtrak?

I cannot comprehend the attitude that starts with "this sucks" and says: "let's make it better with tons of new unaccountable anonymous bureaucrats, tons of new paperwork and policies tied to unrelated political goals that change with each election, and piles of unionized government workers who cannot be fired and who have no competition."

The question SHOULD have been: "Why have they no been broken-up yet"?

The merger of Boeing and McDonnell Douglas should NEVER have been allowed in any SANE world. The USA likes to think of itself as a country with a market-based economy... but that massive merger of Boeing and McD was the final step in the Boeing drive to eliminate all domestic airline builder competitors. The natural result was the 737Max fiasco where government needed its one supplier so badly that it essentially let it regulate itself - and the result killed hundreds of innocent people.