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I propose a fix, at least for the vaccine issue: The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 needs to be repealed.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.

On first blush this crash LOOKED just like the Chicago DC-10 crash, and given that the MD-11 is a DC-10 derivative, even I thought it was the same cause when I initially saw the video.

The DC-10 was a very impressive design, but with a couple of design flaws that lead to a lot of deaths. When I first learned about those initial flaws long ago (Aft cargo door latch flaws, and all sets of redundant controls rigged along the underside of the passenger deck) I decided I'd never fly on one. Early cargo door failures caused the cargo bay to depressurize, which cause the deck to buckle, taking out all the primary and backup controls at once [facepalm]. These problems were eventually corrected. The Chicago crash did indeed begin with the left engine departing from the aircraft on the takeoff, causing a left roll and crash, (which is why the two incidents look the same on video) BUT the root cause of the engine loss was NOT the same as the recent UPS MD-11. With the DC-10 crash, the maintenance crew used an unapproved method to remove the engine for maintenance and re-install it (a fork lift, IIRC). In doing so they saved themselves time, but they damaged the engine mounting hardware. The Chicago crash was, therefore, cause by deliberate human actions contrary to the design documents of the aircraft. There are some single-point failure items there because modern airliners are designed to allow their engines to shear-off in certain situations as a safety feature. The UPS MD-11 incident APPEARS to be a fatigue failure in the aft spherical bearing of the engine mount - NOT a deliberate human mis-deed. It's a little early to fault Boeing for not anticipating a premature failure of a particular solid piece of metal with no documented evidence of fatigue. This is, of course, preliminary and I have every confidence in the NTSB; we will all have the answer with certainty in about 12 months.

Incidentally, I eventually DID fly on the DC-10 and would do so even today on a properly maintained one. Like its competitor, the L1011, these Tri-jets were amazing bits of tech from a unique time. Like any new tech, they needed a bit of time to mature, but once the initial problems were fixed, they were perfectly safe when properly operated, maintained, and inspected. The simple truth is that a DESIGN can be good, and yet an individual instance of it can fail for an oddball reason (like a subtle flaw in a solid hunk of metal from which a component was milled). It's easy for somebody with an opinion and an internet connection to assert that a design is bad if even one instance of it fails, but that's just not life in the real world, and anybody who thinks it is is welcome to try producing something 1% as complex but with absolute perfection. These MD-11s were still in service because the owners still found them to be the optimal solution to particular challenges. There are airliners in wide use today that I still would not board because I consider some of the design choices made to be risky, and that's BEFORE introducing things like metal fatigue into the mix.

Use caution when trusting the New York Times to properly inform you of anything technical; it's not really in their wheelhouse. They're really more of a people-and-politics rag that benefits from a cushy set of back channels to some people in industry and government. For anything related to transportation either within the USA or involving a vehicle built in the USA, the single best entity of the US Government is your friend: The NTSB. The NTSB is small, and has no power to regulate anybody, so they're mostly left alone and unaffected by politics (an insanely rare thing in government). They bring in the experts they need on a case-by-case basis and they do not allow anybody to pressure them on time as they do their one true job: investigate transportation failures and write detailed, clear reports that anybody may freely read in order to benefit everybody with increased safety. Because they stay tightly focused on that one job, they do it better than anybody else on Earth, and it's really too bad other parts of out government cannot seem to adopt this model.

all Democrats are for mass-murdering millions of people - since they're for various degrees of Marxism and the pursuit of Marxism killed over a hundred million people in the 20th century...

Wow. This brain-dead over-simplified method of analysis is FUN. Yup. If everybody played such ignorant games with political stuff the world would be a MUCH friendlier and better place where everybody gets along... [/sarc]

I know you thought you were being clever, but you made a dumb assertion and did not even make a cheap attempt to justify the assertion. Nothing at all. Zippo. Zilch. I made a better argument in may sarcastic reply [facepalm]. Next time at least deploy a teensy smidge of effort and type something like "I believe {stupid idea X} for the following reason...."

You miss on every detail, so while it's probably funny to you and anybody else ignorant of the basics, it lacks a core element of comedy: a basis in truth or reality and thus will only be funny to those in your bubble rather than everybody generally. Put another way, you're doing Jimmy Kimmel not Johnny Carson.

I'll start with the least critical common error of your thinking: The devil of the Bible is NOT the devil of Dante Alighieri (see: Divine Comedy). He is a created being, cast down and condemned, and NOT in charge of anything related to hades/hell. God does not have him running the place. He's doomed to be just another inmate in hell eventually and is not the guy in a red suit with a tail who is in charge of keeping the fires hot and punishing people. People who actually take the time to READ the books they are critical of know this.

Like many on the irreligious left, you think Jesus was the smiling "Buddy Christ" of comedy movie fame, rather than the figure described in Biblical texts. That's fine if it flips yer trigger, but it does not earn you any credibility among serious literate people. You presume that because he's is (in your mind) "Buddy Christ" he would insist on open borders and a (naturally then required) grand Marxist redistributionist economic model. It fails on many levels because of many of the things he is recorded as saying/teaching. This is related to another common myth of the left: that Jesus was an illegal alien or a refugee. Jesus of Nazareth was NOT born in Bethlehem because his parents were homeless - they had a home, but were required by the Roman government to go to the city where Joseph was born for census and taxation reasons. Jesus as a newborn was not in a manger because his poor illegal immigrant parents were homeless, but rather, his parents could not get a room at the inn because the place was booked-up because a hostile occupying government forced too many people to travel at the same time and massive modern hotels were not a thing yet. Joseph, the stepdad if you will of Jesus, was no unemployed bum - he was a tradesman (a carpenter/mason). While there was indeed a point in his early life where Jesus (with Joseph and Mary) went into Egypt to escape King Herod's death orders, there's no evidence it was an illegal entry into Egypt, nor did they STAY there and demand citizenship or social services. When the specific threat to the life of the young Jesus was over, the family returned to Israel.

If you are thinking that the Jesus guy those religious people you dislike claim to follow is the cartoon version you seem to think he is, you will never understand the people you are attempting to lampoon, and thus your attempts to mock them will only succeed amongst similarly ignorant people. That person who taught love, charity, kindness, etc ALSO was the one who taught it was not appropriate to give excessively to the poor, to reward those who do not work over those who do, and taught that things like marriage ought to be MORE strictly defined than the marriages of the day (to name but a few items). He may well have fed lots of fish and bread to people who followed him and listened to him on one particular occasion, but he is not recorded as feeding everybody everywhere he went. The Jesus who saved the prostitute from punishment and forgave her sins ALSO told her to go forth and not do it any more; the first part of that does NOT mean he was "tolerant" and embraced "alternate lifestyles". If you only recognize certain aspects of what Jesus taught (the ones you like to use as a weapon) and not the rest then you're not really talking about the same person that the people you oppose are talking about... and they KNOW that... and thus your criticism is hollow and ignorant.

Demonstrate some literacy and intellectual curiosity and actually go read an entire Bible, cover-to-cover, as though it was any other volume you were going to seriously read. You do not need to do this for religious reasons, but rather, for intellectual reasons. The best critics are the ones who actually know what they are talking about. You're not there yet. Not by a large margin.

George Will and Bill Kristol are the sort of "Republicans" and "Conservatives" that drive the rank-and-file conservatives in the GOP crazy... they made piles of money over decades writing books, going on speaking tours and cruises, and being generally treated as very respected wise men... only to go completely insane and argue loudly against everything they previously claimed to stand for the moment a politician came along who actually might DO what they had been publicly only TALKING about for decades. They are the very epitome of the man OUTSIDE the arena; they guys who talk, talk, talk other people into taking actions and then panic and scream and run and hide when somebody does what they said they wanted done.

Here's the dirty little secret to why so many "establishment" and "thought leader" Republicans went the way George and Bill did: Trump broke their business model and threatened to destroy their social lives. As long as they TALKED about various policies (which were NOT enacted), they were tolerated in the fancy dinners and parties and other gatherings of society's elites as interesting or quirky objects of conversation and fascination. As soon as those things were about to happen, the left-leaning elites went mad and would no longer tolerate people who disagreed with them - they insisted the politically different be SILENCED, de-monitized, and de-platformed. The only way guys like George and Bill were gonna be invited to anything again by their pals was if they joined-in on the war against Trump. The other part is this: The opinion makers and thought leaders of the old GOP made a ton of money every election cycle as consultants to various Republican campaigns and candidates. When anybody talked about running for office, these sorts (or their agents) would contact the would-be candidate and say "you can only win with my ideas and my help, and that's gonna cost you.... With the 2016 campaign, Trump destroyed that business model. It wasn't even close. He ignored all those guys (and saved MILLIONS of dollars) and won a race they all claimed he could not possibly win, thereby destroying them doubly (1st by winning without them, and again by proving them wrong in predicting his failure without them). Those with an interest in campaigns, financing, and history would do well to study the numbers on both sides of the political aisle in the 2016 fight - it's eye-opening.

The business model of the entire GOP campaign consulting class and the think tankers on the right has been altered forever and they are not handling it well. The same thing is likely to happen at some point on the left with some future out-of-the-box Dem candidate trashing the business model of the rich beltway opinion makers and consultants over there. Too many people still think this is Bad Orange Man specific; I do not think that. I think it's in-the-box fossilized thinkers versus out-of-the-box rebels and rebels in both the GOP and the Dem sides will ultimately show this.

He's not a good one to invoke on the subject of political conservatives. People THINK he is, for good reason (as I'll explain) but serious political conservatives know better.

Barry Goldwater was not personally "conservative" - he self-identified as a libertarian. As a libertarian, Barry got the support of a bunch of young (at the time) conservatives within a Republican party that was dominated by pablum political sorts who now days are called "establishment" or even "RINO" (Republican In Name Only) political types. These Republican supporters of Barry helped him when he needed them, and thus in 1964 when the GOP looked to be going with people like Rockefeller (who conservatives at the time referred to as "rotten feller") and the desperate politically-active conservatives asked Barry to run for the Republican nomination, he felt he owed it to them to run and to champion their causes. He probably knew full-well that the effort would fail, given of his knowledge of DC politics and the GOP leadership. That presidential run, coupled with [1] his book The Conscience of a Conservative, and [2] the lack of anybody else in the GOP who was that different from the party's core establishment people, made Barry "Mr Conservative" in the eyes of most rank-and-file Republicans for many years. The luster only started to dim in those eyes many years later when Ronald Reagan was in office and far more-aligned with the conservatives while Barry's libertarianism had re-asserted.

On that book: The Conscience of a Conservative was not actually written by Barry and he did not necessarily agree with all of it. The book was ghost written for him by L. Brent Bozell Jr, whose son (L Brent Bozell III) would eventually arise in GOP circles as a staunch conservative and is currently Trump's ambassador to South Africa. While Ghost Writing has been around for a long time, many (most?) average Americans did not know much about it or pay attention to it even when explicitly told. People now are both more aware and more cynical and thus fewer today would likely read that book and then presume Barry was the definition of a conservative.

Now, to be fair to Barry (for whom I'll admit a bit of political fondness) I have little doubt that he encountered more than his fair share of uncompromising politically-active Christian "leaders". Every movement of every sort gets its share of self-appointed "leaders" who are in it for sometimes the most impure reasons (often power and money), so I have little doubt that he encountered his share of people on the political right who were the equivalent of the Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton types on the left. Such people fit into their own niches and do not necessarily define everybody they pretend to be like (be they charlatans of the left or of the right).

When founded, the United States was approximately 90% protestant Christian, approximately 10% Catholic, and the remaining tiny percent Jewish. There was no measurable number of any other belief system. People asserting "no, they were DEISTS!" are either deceiving or ill-informed... because the world view of those supposed deists was a Christian world view (Christian Bible, history, traditions, etc) and what was meant was more like what a modern person would mean if he said "non-denominational". When many of the founders wrote about these issues they wrote in the context and terms of their day, and while they all presumed a Judeo-Christian belief system. Many of that era were adamantly opposed to the schemes popular in much of Europe where it was considered that a "Christian nation" was a nation with an established (i.e. state created/mandated church, like the Church of England) Church (the Church part making it "Christian" as opposed to Hindu or Muslim, etc). Thomas Jefferson, for example, is oft cited as a man who did not believe in the supernatural and who originated the "wall of separation" (of Church and State), actually identified himself as a Christian, and when he edited his own version of a religious book with the supernatural stuff removed, used as his book the Bible, not a Quran or Bhagavad Gita. At the founding, nearly all US colonies (which became states) had official Christian churches and one could not hold office in any state without a statement of Christian faith. As a result the previous poster MAY have been right in asserting that it was a Christian nation by virtue of being founded by Christians, founded on Christian beliefs and principles, having a nearly entirely Christian population, etc. At the very least, one would have to say that the USA was circumstantially Christian when founded.

250 years ago, being a "Christian nation" would have meant a VERY different thing to people than it does now; there were plenty of people then who would have identified as, for example, Anglicans but not proceeded to identify as Christian in some sort of official sense. Such terms were taken seriously and carried some specific implications. In the early 21st century, things are very different - when people are asked their religion, many who are not even particularly religious will think something like "I'm not Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, or Atheist... so I must be Christian". That's a VERY different perspective and use of words, and the modern lack seriousness and of intellectual rigor should not confuse our understanding of the past.

If he meant that the country was founded with the Bible as its basic law, and requirements that all office holders be members of a certain national church and have statements of faith posted somewhere for public scrutiny etc, or that there is a Constitutional declaration that the nation is officially Christian (as opposed to founded and populated by Christians) with some Constitutional requirement that it remain a Christian nation then he is quite wrong. The founders left it to each generation to run the place for better or for worse.

Now, if YOU meant to imply that the country is naturally atheist, or agnostic, and that the founders were irreligious and said little about their religious beliefs then you are either in a fantasy book club of your own, or in one with the previous poster (depending upon what he meant with his post). This is the sort of thinking that leads lunatics to hyperventilate at the "threat" when they think they see the current nation (probably minority Christian at this point) move a tiny bit in the direction of more "Christian" (even in the modern watered-down sense) as though this might be something unprecedented. Anybody who reads much of what our founders wrote knows full-well that they were all very religious (practically hyper-religious compared to modern Americans) and that their beliefs were based on an assumption of the legitimacy of the Bible. The founders specifically invoke the Biblical God (the Christian Bible was the religious book of the day they all used) in multiple places in the Declaration of Independence ("...the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God..., "...all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator...", "...appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world..." (this one is interesting, because as readers of the Bible, including the Founders, know, the Book of Revelation identifies Jesus as the Supreme Judge of the World) "...with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence..."). There's simply no honest way to avoid all of this.

You can listen to all the modern biased college professors and self-appointed YouTube experts who tickle your ears with what you want to hear, and imagine anything you want about the past, but the simple thing is: If you want to know about the past, spend some time reading a few dusty old books by the people who were there at the time and who wrote stuff down in the simple hope that people like you and me would someday be wise enough to pick them up and read them and gain a little knowledge and wisdom the easy way (as opposed to: "by way of hard knocks").

Microsoft, like most corporate giants, started small with a founder or founders who had a good product or service. He/She/They proceeded to build the business, expand the product line, grow the customer base, and ... go public - effectively selling partial control to investors (who generally do not intimately know the business or industry and have only injected cash, but who get a board of directors and a say in the operation). Over time, as the company grows and time passes, the original person or persons die-off, or retire, or get tired of dealing with the board or the bigness of the business and cash-out.

The board then hires a CEO they think will do well, and it will seem to go well for years as a combination of corporate inertia and loyal employees and a devoted customer base all help to maintain the illusion. The board and its hired-gun CEO, however, were not there at the founding; they did not have the vision nor the drive and commitment to build the business in the first place and they are usually not competent enough to keep it afloat forever. There's always some CEO who is champion of some bright new idea to overhaul or re-do things or take "bold new steps" or some other drivel to "reinvigorate" the business. Everybody has seen Steve Jobs in a turtle neck boldly launching something and all these lesser players know the drill... but they usually so misunderstand the company they are leading that they drive it into the ground. When the incompetence is at peak, they will sell-off units/divisions and claim this retraction from a marketplace their predecessors were competent enough to enter and serve, and claim something stupid like they're "right sizing". It's a delusion, a mis-diagnosis of the actual problem that needs fixing. I suspect we're seeing a form of this common corporate disaster unfolding.

Microsoft's problem is NOT that the products are written in C/C++ (they became a mega-successful company on that very codebase)

Microsoft's problem is that every version of Windows is more bloated and more of a form of spyware than its predecessor. Coding it in Rust won't fix ANY of that. They can re-write their entire codebase in Forth or FORTRAN or any other bleeping language and it will have no impact on the actual problem. The company was born in the American culture with a team of young Americans (for better or worse) and this included the Yankee attitude that a person's personal computer was THEIRS and their data was THEIRS and what a person did with his computer was nobody else's business. Instead of leasing a computer and its OS, you could buy a computer and buy a Microsoft OS and then use it privately and securely and what you did with it was nobody else's business. The company's current CEO is not from the American culture (no, not skin color, CULTURE) and seems to not understand the entire POINT of the 1970s and 1980s microcomputer revolution. Not understanding the point, and not "getting it" on the independence and privacy stuff means he's gonna drive the company into a serious ditch at some point.

There's a massive corporate graveyard somewhere where the corpses of many dead former giants of industry lie, whose ghosts are anticipating the arrival of another former marketplace titan, named Microsoft. The investors need to keep an eye on this one. If the company does not straighten out and re-acquaint itself with the very reasons it exists, it will run out of time and it will become a rotting corpse of itself and get parted-out by some future idiot CEO trying to "right-size" it....

When a man and a woman form a family unit and have kids, the old-fashioned natural way, the damage from any person having such genetic issues is very limited; most modern families have very few kids and even older families on rural farms usually had fewer than ten. No husband and wife, no matter how enthusiastic and frisky are gonna have 200 kids.

When people decide that we all live in a brave new world now where the old rules no longer apply and mankind can do ANYTHING and consequences-be-damned, we can end-up breaking-down those firewalls which nature had put in place over millenia.

It has been pointed out, by persons wiser then me, that often traditions are actually the solutions people taught themselves long ago to problems they have long forgotten. This does not, of course, mean that all traditions are good, but rather that one should think long and hard about the possible consequences of up-ending traditions before doing it. We humans like to think of ourselves as all modern and evolved and able to monkey-around with nature with impunity. Why, we're not like those peasants on farms way back a hundred years ago, WE have SMARTPHONES!...

The donor here is not to blame (unless one takes the position that the very idea of sperm donors is bad, and thus he should not have been a donor) - let's face it: if the screeners did not know about the problem, then the donor likely did not know. The problem of a bunch of women all getting pregnant by the same man IS a problem and would be prevented by the tradition that men and women pair-up to make kids instead of all the women in town going to the one most-handsome or wealthiest guy in town...

All throughout Western Civilization (does not seem to happen elsewhere) there are people (generally globalist and business oriented) making the argument for mass immigration from 3rd world countries, and when they think they are not getting their way, or are getting their way but more slowly than they want, they like to use this particular argument, which average people never seem to think to question. The argument is:

"The risk is it could lead to shortages of critical skills that end up harming [fill-in the national name] competitiveness."

It comes from the elites and it SOUNDS so intelligent, and so intellectual, and so concerned with the well-being of the citizens, that people just accept it as some sort of proven fact. People hear it and end up thinking "oh, I guess we need to accept this immigration so we're not hurt", OR "well, I guess we're gonna have to take the hit, because we need to limit immigration anyway (for whatever reason, like reducing poverty or crime, etc)". Nobody seems to ever back off and question the obviously screwed-up dishonest premise. A nation cannot have grown to (in this example) 10 million having all the skills it needs and then, if it decides not to grow to 11 million, suddenly not have enough skilled workers. It's IMPOSSIBLE. Such a nation has already PROVED it has all the skilled people it needs for a population of 10 million. If the nation in question has not suddenly grown to 10 million from a much smaller population by explicitly importing all the skilled workers rather than raising and education its own population, then it has already PROVED the sustainability of those skills by raising and training the people currently doing those jobs.

This mass immigration of people into Western countries is largely driven by ONE thing: The wealthiest people (generally, the investor class) need to keep corporate profits up (and thus the revenue produced by their investments) and with human labor being often the most expensive part of a business that has SOME cost flexibility, they need a way to suppress the costs of wages and benefits. Average workers often miss the point that companies do not need to replace all their workers with cheap immigrants to push wages and benefits down. No. They only need to bring on a few immigrants, or in some cases simply have those immigrants in the community, in order to get the native population to be too insecure to ask for a raise or ask for improved benefits. A big corporation can be raking in record-breaking profits and yet employees can be afraid to ask for raises because they fear being replaced by an immigrant who is willing to work for less. The people pushing all the mass immigration would not be pushing it so hard if it was not very important to them.

This is not, and never has been, about race/ethnicity. The people pushing it WANT everybody to talk about it as a racial thing, so that any opponents can be trashed in public as "racists" and "xenophobes" (a FANTASTIC tactic for shutting-down any opposing argument without addressing any facts). The pushers of mass immigration are very happy to have all the arguments be: "our opponents are nasty snivelling little racists" rather than a detailed exploration of how multi-billion-dollar empires cannot afford to pay their workers a little more so they can afford decent homes, food, and healthcare. They do not want people questioning companies who lay off people the company cannot possibly afford to keep on, and need to reduce benefits for workers, yet CAN afford to have a CEO paid more than enough to cover those very costs. This has always actually been about CLASS and power and money - the things that actually matter the most to the elites in society, and which they most need the public to not pay attention to.

Your reading comprehension skills need some refreshing. He wrote:

"Spontaneous combustion doesn't exist. Combustion only occurs when things like fuel, heat/pressure, and oxygen are all shoved together." (highlighting is mine) and you only seem to have read the first sentence of the pair. He was clearly indicating that things like combustion do not arise for no reason and from nothing, that somebody brings things together in ways that CAUSE a reaction (in the illustration, combustion, but in the general topic, reactions to immigration issues). You then pointed to two examples WHERE SOMEBODY BROUGHT STUFF TOGETHER AND THUS STARTED A FIRE and somehow think that refutes his point that fires (or immigration issue reactions) only start when somebody brings things together in an unfortunate way...

Your supposed clever refutation is the fail.

Now, as to the point he was making:

I disagree on several points, but will only say this: I think his "solutions" are actually part of the problem with modern politics. He says "Try listening. Try acknowledging. Try reflecting. Try redirecting. Try doing the work of actual empathy..." which is (sadly) the sort of thing modern politicians and their obnoxious consultants, campaign managers, and strategists are all too adept at faking. Bill Clinton's famous "I feel your pain" line comes to mind. The scumbaggery of the modern political class is partly that they have a plan of action their masters/bribers/"campaign contributors" demand and they know it will upset the public, so they go on a "listening tour" and they acknowledge peoples' negative reactions, and they express an embarrassing level of empathy.... before completely ignoring the people and jamming their pre-selected policy through anyway. It works for them because far too many average people get too impressed by the totally fake and hollow words and emotions, and like the distracted audience in a magic show, they miss the sleight-of-hand. The general public is too-often too occupied by their own personal lives and lacks the patience and dedication to stay attentive and notice when, weeks or months after all the fine emoting WORDS, the ACTIONS of the politicians are completely contrary.

We do NOT need more politicians pretending to be concerned and responsive to their constituents by a bunch of mealy-mouthed platitudes and "town halls" then ramming bad policies into place anyway; we need more honest politicians who will either say "I'm gonna screw you over and take the money from rich special interests who fund me" OR who will listen to their constituents and then NOT DO THE BAD STUFF. With that level of honesty, people would do a better job of electing people and then actually getting what they voted for instead of always voting for stuff and then being surprised when they don't get it.