The companies complaining to Congress about a $55MM cut could easily fund it themselves.

> But go ahead. Tell me the last time you were asked to “write an essay”. In the real world. That actually provided value.

Several times a week. Written communication is an essential skill, even for software developers. You won't get far in your career without the ability to craft a well-structured, clear, and convincing multipage document.

Trump Devotion Syndrome? Yeah, that's becoming a real problem.

I write in Emacs with LaTeX for typesetting. I suppose I could save every revision in Git. I'm sure a humanities professor would love that.

And it doesn't even come close to Emacs.

. . . social media would be inaccessible.

You could Google it. A quick search shows that, between 2007 and 2014, the U.S. extradited 20 U.K. citizens and 5 U.S. citizens to the U.K. The U.S. has extradition treaties with over 100 countries, so there are no doubt many other examples.

For some people, certainly. For serious photographers, glass matters. You will never get the quality of a Leica lens from a smartphone, regardless of how much the sensor and image enhancement is improved. In this case, size matters.

> . . . plain old non-AI IDE CS students should be limited to either vi or Emacs. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. It's essential to learn the basics.

That's inaccurate. With a solid CS education, you should be able to implement Python (or something comparable) yourself. The same applies to C. Yes, standing on the shoulders of giants helps, but there's nothing magical about machine language, a C compiler, or a Python interpreter. If a CS degree program doesn't provide graduates with the ability to create those, it isn't worth the name.

I would argue (what a strange phrase, I actually AM arguing) that any college degree should require at least one physics course. Why are engineers considered limited by not having read Foucault while other disciplines are considered fine without knowing basic math?

The only group attempting genocide in Gaza is Hamas. Read their founding documents and believe what they say.

Exactly this. Nothing else should be trusted.

Send up your own drone and do some dogfighting!

I agreed to a mutually beneficial arrangement with my employer where I work and they pay. The government uses force to compel me to give them part of that payment.

I agreed to a mutually beneficial arrangement with the previous owner of my house to give them money in exchange for it. The government uses force to compel me to pay them a certain amount of money annually.

I agreed to a mutually beneficial arrangement with the owner of the goods to give them money in exchange for said goods. The government uses force to compel me to pay a percentage of that money to them. You can try to make an argument that taxes are necessary, but you cannot avoid the clear fact that they are imposed by force and the threat of force.