I don't fall for clickbait. But it's impossible to ignore the headlines, and sometimes it's fun to read how silly they get, like the UN chief claiming the Earth is boiling.

I apologize for assuming you meant personal criticisms. There's too much of it everywhere, not just slashdot, and I shouldn't assume everyone is doing it.

When slashdot started requiring logins to avoid most of the spambots, it annoyed me, and when I did finally sign up, my handle was my protest. It was amazing back then how many others accused me of hiding behind the anonymous handle.

Trump is taking about sending $2000 checks to everybody from tariff revenue. Where does he get that authority?

The whole pile of cards is rotten. Quibbling about which President is worse is just more clickbait, whether you like the word or not.

Social media has become a toxic dump. If you wouldn't allow children to play in waste effluent from a 1960s nuclear power plant, then you shouldn't allow them to play in the social media that's out there. Because, frankly, of the two, plutonium is safer.

I do, however, contend that this is a perfectly fixable problem. There is no reason why social media couldn't be safe. USENET was never this bad. Hell, Slashdot at its worst was never as bad as Facebook at its best. And Kuro5hin was miles better than X. Had a better name, too. The reason it's bad is that politicians get a lot of kickbacks from the companies and the advertisers, plus a lot of free exposure to millions. Politicians would do ANYTHING for publicity.

I would therefore contend that Australia is fixing the wrong problem. Brain-damaging material on Facebook doesn't magically become less brain-damaging because kids have to work harder to get brain damage. Nor are adults mystically immune. If you took the planet's IQ today and compared it to what it was in the early 1990s, I'm convinced the global average would have dropped 30 points. Australia is, however, at least acknowledging that a problem exists. They just haven't identified the right one. I'll give them participation points. The rest of the globe, not so much.

> The President can only direct funds at his discretion if the Congress has allocated those funds for him.

Well, in theory. Biden tried several times to soak taxpayers for student loans without Congressional approval, and that was up to a trillion dollars all told. Trump kept trying to divert funds for his wall.

If you think "falling" for Trump's trolling over this measly export tax is silly, take it up with the many pundits both pro and con who think it is worth their clickbait.

I don't remember now, other than not being some hysterical TDS-ridden pundit. It may have been what was planned then, it may have been the kind of hints Trump likes flicking out, I don't remember. If you say it isn't now, I'll give that more credence, but everything Trump does changes daily.

I do not think it goes into his pocket. But last I read of it, it goes into a fund controlled by the President -- a slush fund, in olden terms.

Just as he does not personally own the US Steel golden shares which were the price for allowing the sale to the Japanese. But the President personally controls those shares, and he personally has veto over everything US Steel does.

One of the alleged differences between socialism and fascism is that a socialist government owns the means of production while a fascist government "merely" controls them. It's a distinction without a meaningful difference.

The big picture point is, he claimed banning the export of those chips to China was a matter of national security. Now it turns out that paying an unconstitutional 25% export tax into a fund controlled by the President makes the national security aspect vanish. There are names for this kind of corruption.

Trump told us it was a matter of national security to ban selling these precious chips to China. Now he tells us 25% for the big guy can make that problem go away.

Sounds pretty cheap to me. So much for the Art of the Deal.

I got a bogus red light ticket once, and that was what convinced me to get a dashcam. That judge just took the cops' word for everything, so even a dashcam might not have helped, but it couldn't have hurt.

No, inflation is an expansion of the money supply. When the government prints more money than the population growth requires, banks lend more money at lower rates, people and businesses borrow more, and the surplus money chasing the same goods and services increases the demand and prices rise. That is economic inflation, my term, which is different from what laymen call inflation: some prices going up, as from tariffs or other taxes.

I have read of people given tickets for passing stopped school buses with their red STOP signs swung out, who got the ticket dismissed by pointing out that normal STOP signs mean PAUSE then continue. I have no idea if the original stories were true or if that still works. STOP signs really mean wait until the intersection clears, and arguably the temporary intersection created by the school bus doesn't clear until the kiddies are across the street.

That's actually a good question. Inks have changed somewhat over the past 5,000 years, and there's no particular reason to think that tattoo inks have been equally mobile across this timeframe.

But now we come to a deeper point. Basically, tattoos (as I've always understand it) are surgically-engineered scars, with the scar tissue supposedly locking the ink in place. It's quite probable that my understanding is wrong - this isn't exactly an area I've really looked into in any depth, so the probability of me being right is rather slim. Nonetheless, if I had been correct, then you might well expect the stuff to stay there. Skin is highly permeable, but scar tissue less so. As long as the molecules exceed the size that can migrate, then you'd think it would be fine.

That it isn't fine shows that one or more of these ideas must be wrong.

Investment is a tricky one.

I'd say that learning how to learn is probably the single-most valuable part of any degree, and anything that has any business calling itself a degree will make this a key aspect. And that, alone, makes a degree a good investment, as most people simply don't know how. They don't know where to look, how to look, how to tell what's useful, how to connect disparate research into something that could be used in a specific application, etc.

The actual specifics tend to be less important, as degree courses are well-behind the cutting edge and are necessarily grossly simplified because it's still really only crude foundational knowledge at this point. Students at undergraduate level simply don't know enough to know the truly interesting stuff.

And this is where it gets tricky. Because an undergraduate 4-year degree is aimed at producing thinkers. Those who want to do just the truly depressingly stupid stuff can get away with the 2 year courses. You do 4 years if you are actually serious about understanding. And, in all honesty, very few companies want entry-level who are competent at the craft, they want people who are fast and mindless. Nobody puts in four years of network theory or (Valhalla forbid) statistics for the purpose of being mindless. Not unless the stats destroyed their brain - which, to be honest, does happen.

Humanities does not make things easier. There would be a LOT of benefit in technical documentation to be written by folk who had some sort of command of the language they were using. Half the time, I'd accept stuff written by people who are merely passing acquaintances of the language. Vague awareness of there being a language would sometimes be an improvement. But that requires that people take a 2x4 to the usual cultural bias that you cannot be good at STEM and arts at the same time. (It's a particularly odd cultural bias, too, given how much Leonardo is held in high esteem and how neoclassical universities are either top or near-top in every country.)

So, yes, I'll agree a lot of degrees are useless for gaining employment and a lot of degrees for actually doing the work, but the overlap between these two is vague at times.

The degree isn't about "getting a high-paid job", it's about knowing what the hell you're doing once you get a job. Although, fair enough, it's quite plausible that not many degrees would meet that standard either.

There is a possibility of a short-circuit causing an engine shutdown. Apparently, there is a known fault whereby a short can result in the FADEC "fail-safing" to engine shutdown, and this is one of the competing theories as the wiring apparently runs near a number of points in the aircraft with water (which is a really odd design choice).

Now, I'm not going to sit here and tell you that (a) the wiring actually runs there (the wiring block diagrams are easy to find, but block diagrams don't show actual wiring paths), (b) that there is anything to indicate that water could reach such wiring in a way that could cause a short, or (c) that it actually did so. I don't have that kind of information.

All I can tell you, at this point, is that aviation experts are saying that a short at such a location would cause an engine shutdown and that Boeing was aware of this risk.

I will leave it to the experts to debate why they're using electrical signalling (it's slower than fibre, heavier than fibre, can corrode, and can short) and whether the FADEC fail-safes are all that safe or just plain stupid. For a start, they get paid to shout at each other, and they actually know what specifics to shout at each other about.

But, if the claims are remotely accurate, then there were a number of well-known flaws in the design and I'm sure Boeing will just love to answer questions on why these weren't addressed. The problem being, of course, is that none of us know which of said claims are indeed remotely accurate, and that makes it easy for air crash investigators to go easy on manufacturers.