that yer heads are pumped so full of crap and propaganda that you're living in a fake world. Stuff does not make sense to you PRECISELY because you're not seeing the real world, you're seeing an incoherent propaganda world.

Examples:

"Europe knew that Russia was running roughshod over the United States voters and working hard successfully to put Trump back in the White House." - GARBAGE. The Trump-Russia collusion crap was cooked-up by a former British spy and his Russian spy pals on the payroll of the Hillary Clinton campaign in the form of the "Steele Dossier". Democrats ran with it both as an excuse for how Hillary massively outspent Trump in 2016 and lost (backers/investors expect answers when over a billion dollars are squandered), AND as input to the FBI and congress in attempts to get rid of Trump and undo the election.

"the United States still has the largest military on the planet." - NOPE. China has a bigger army, and bigger navy. The US does have a bigger Air Force, and of course a big edge in quality. As has been noted in the past however, "quantity has a quality all its own"

"You would think electing a convicted felon, pedophile, rapist and six-time bankrupt businessman to be the most powerful person on our planet would have been a clue but nope. People still think Americans have the slightest shred of sanity." - WOW, you went right into the bat-guano-crazy-zone with Rosie O Donnell on that hot mess! [1] Technically, you're not a convicted felon in the US until sentence is passed, which will never happen on the bogus political charges over Trump paying his lawyer (charges never meant to actually stick, just to last long enough to hurt him in the election) [2] You're liar, Trump has never been convicted of pedophilia, not is there any evidence he is a pedo. You're dishonestly trying to smear Trump by associating him with Epstein, but of course you have no interest in destroying any of the Democrats who eagerly associated with Epstein long after Trump kicked him aside. Like lots of people he knew Epstein long ago, but unlike the rest, Trump kicked the guy out of his places and banned him after finding out what he was up to [3] Rapist? Trump's never been convicted of that, nor has anybody come forward with any evidence of him raping anybody (the CIVIL judgement, NOT criminal conviction, in the E Jean Carol case is for DEFAMATION and will likely be overturned), [4] Nearly every businessman who starts a bunch of businesses ends up shutting some down, and often it's done deliberately via bankruptcy. I may not like it, and you may not like it, but you'd apparently be shocked at how many Democrats have done this and more... in fact Trump WAS a Democrat during all of those bankruptcies.

"About 40% of us believe the Earth is only 6,000 years old and about 35% of us believe Noah's flood is real." - This is a combination of ignorance, sloppy stats, presumption, and insults. I'm not going to respond with in detail, which nobody would read any way, suffice it to say that the percent of Jews, Christians of various denominations, and Muslims cannot be easily extrapolated into how many people believe a particular age of the Earth, believe in a global flood, or any other simplistic thing you want to rant about. Plenty of people who are in these mono-theistic faiths believe in a "young Earth" (with lots of variation in the specifics) but plenty believe in an "old Earth" with many variations of the theme. Plenty of these people believe in various versions of an ancient flood (some thinking it was global, some thinking it was regional, some thinking it was symbolic, etc AND people in nearly every civilization on Earth regardless of religion have ancient stories of a great flood (every hear of the "Epic of Gilgamesh?) Your rant was clearly a "we have too many crazy religious people, and I'm a superior sane atheist" ploy which relies on the assumption that in a situation where NOBODY can prove how when and why everything began, there's some super-validity to claiming to believe everything made itself from nothing for no reason. Far greater minds than you have wrestled with that problem and been less sure of themselves than you appear to be.

The way you jumbled all that together and tossed it out as an insult, and then followed it with "We absolutely would launch nuclear weapons safe in the knowledge that God would protect us from a counter-attack. We are that fucking insane." places you firmly in the column of "delusional and in need of updated meds". Calm Down. In the immortal words of Londo Molari, "it can't be THAT bad..."

The simple fact is: for all our faults, the United States has been the most-stable and least-kleptocratic large powerful nation for about a century. Our Presidents, good and bad, have all been (in the grand scheme of things) reasonable (yes, INCLUDING Trump). We're the nation all the other nations look to as a provider of stability, safety, and some semblance of justice - PROVABLY SO: none of the rest have been willing to step-up and do the job. Name another nation other than Russia, China, or India that has the resources and willpower to be a superpower. One would have to be the singularly most stupid AND foolish person on Earth to want any of THOSE 3 to be the global cop.
As detestable as I found Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and Barack Obama to be, THEY were all better than what other nations would have offered at the time, and they were each MY president.
As detestable as YOU no doubt think Trump to be, he is still better than anybody the rest of the world would offer, and he's YOUR president.

Those women on The View are free to be insane; they're cheap entertainment. Those lefty vloggers and bloggers and news outlets you almost certainly get your insane factoids from are MAKING MONEY off the clicks they get when they keep you agitated and in OUTRAGE mode. None of them has one ounce of accountability or responsibility for what happens in the world. Our presidents (ALL of them, and of ANY party) have immense responsibilities, and a ton of murky problems to solve with conflicting issues that make very few decisions clean, without risk, and without collateral damage. YOU clearly could not handle that situation, since you clearly get all would-up over simple disagreements over things that don't really matter... making YOU less stable than Trump.

Grow up

Life's better here in mature adult land.

"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things." - I Corinthians 13:11 (from a letter by the Apostle Paul to the Church at Corinth)

Do you people have no memory at all, or is it just sheer hypocrisy?

Joe Biden had gas prices $1 to $2 dollars per gallon HIGHER and a lot of you were clapping like seals with the presumption that this was some good plot to replace gasoline with electricity and "save the planet", when it was actually just a doddering old fool driving inflation up to 9%. The current price spike is at least tied to an attempt to stop major western cities from melting under mushroom clouds within the next decade or so. That's a bargain, [admittedly] IF it succeeds [which is, like all military and international endeavors, NOT guaranteed].

I'm in California, so the one-two punch of Gavin Newsom AND Trump's Iran actions hit ME and the people around me harder than most people in the country, yet I think this is currently worth it. NOT because of Trump anything, but because of 47 years of "Death to America" Ayatollahs scrambling for missile tech, nukes, and backing nearly every bad terrorist outfit on the planet - a VERY BAD combo.

Maybe you have to be old enough to have an attention span longer than that of the average squirrel to get it.

Cheap insults and expletives are no substitute for a rational argument, and they don't make you look wise or tough; it just sounds like the frustrated rant of a teenager.

This is Slashdot where, many years ago, many of us [being the geeky technical sorts] actually put together cogent arguments. It's sad to see the degradation of quality in the comments, but I suppose it tracks with the general stupification of younger people raised by public school teachers with political agendas. You could have at least gotten creative and attempted to reinvigorate some old terms like "carbuncle" or "lickspittle"...

Hey, you kids, Git offa my lawn!

Not even the dumbest fencepost in the field would be a big enough idiot to bring back the Obamination "deal" in which we give billions of dollars to the mad Ayatollah and agree to watch him take ten years to build a nuclear bomb.... followed by an assembly line of nukes over the following years...followed by nukes being handed out like roadside bombs, suicide belts, and explosively formed penetrators, to any Iran-aligned terrorists who want them.

The Obama "deal" was nothing more than yet another president trying to find a way to avoid doing anything about Iran during his term of office and hope the bad results hit on somebody else's watch. The most-important thing there is for any career politician is avoiding responsibility/accountability, and the Iran mess was thought likely to blow-up in the face of anybody who touched it. President after President listened to the permanent Washington bureaucrats as they wrung their hands and sweated a lot over the supposedly unsolvable problem Jimmy Carter left behind. These "experts" all advised against doing anything to Iran, as the biggest baddest military in the region (partly MADE that way by these same unelected "experts" who supported arming that county (including making Iran the only country on planet Earth to ever get a shipment of F-14 Tomcats) while their hand-selected puppet, the Shah, was in power). Every single President, in BOTH parties, tolerated the bad behavior as it got worse and worse because all were warned the risks were too high and there were elections in the USA to consider...

No. If you're gonna assert that "by all accounts" (in other words: "EVERYBODY says") Trump is trying to bring back the dumbest deal any human being ever made (the Obama-Iran nukes deal) then you need to provide some proof. That deal was even worse than the deal Ukraine made to give up its nukes because 3 foreign leaders (Clinton, Blair, and Putin) guaranteed their territorial integrity if they did it.

Hate Orban all you want for being a pain to the EU, not wanting to amp-up a war in Europe, not wanting his country flooded with migrants etc, but he's NOT "an authoritarian leader". He was ELECTED into power, RE-ELECTED into power, and eventually having lost an ELECTION is leaving office. He had better relations with Putin (in PUBLIC) than other European leaders, but not to the level of a stooge - he opposed Russia's attack on Georgia (the country, not the US state) but it's actually a bit hard to say he's been more of a Putin puppet than the other leaders of Europe have been (in PRIVATE - they all posture as Putin opponents publicly). Let's face it: for all the bluster, Europe's leaders are mostly PRIVATELY subservient to Putin, as they refuse to properly maintain the military power to even slightly oppose Putin (they just want the US to do it at expense to the US taxpayer). They yell and scream about Ukraine and how evil Putin is (yeah, he actually IS, but that's a bit beside my point and not what really matters here...) but at the same time they made themselves dependent upon Russia for energy. Back in Trump's first term when he pointed this out publicly at the UN, the German representatives laughed about it. Remember that blown-up gas pipeline that had everybody so worked-up a few years ago? Yeah... natural gas line from Russia to Europe. The Europeans were demanding America spend BILLIONS of dollars a year protecting them from Putin at the very same time they were making themselves dependent upon him AND funding his war machine with purchases of his natural gas.

Hate JD Vance all you want, but he was NOT in Iran... the negotiations were hosted by Pakistan and took place in Islamabad. [eyeroll]

Hate Trump and Rubio all you want, BUT them being at some stupid pugilist event was at worst a huge nothing-burger and at best an excellent international signal. Nobody with a brain expected the lunatic theocratic shia Muslim leaders of Iran to be serious in those negotiations... they've been dishonest terrorist-supporting scumbags since the 1979 revolution and it's even a little hard for people outside that regime to even know who in it is in a position to negotiate anything (that may, indeed, have been the primary intent of this meeting, from a US perspective). It's not a bad thing to show the world that the American President is not all tied-down by these shenanigans (it was a TERRIBLE look in 1979 when Jimmy Carter did the opposite). If anything important was going to happen, everybody knows the negotiating team could easily contact the President. This is true for ANY American President of either party. Were you this worked-up when Kamela was Border Czar and Biden could not be reached?

On what planet did Biden "work with congress"? The man was so out of it he routinely shook hands with people who were not there, tried to talk to a member of congress who'd been dead for months, and did not hold unscripted press conferences because his staff knew he was not up to answering any challenging questions. Democrats did not so much push their own incumbent from the ticket as he fell off of it by melting-down in a Presidential debate in front of America's voters, thereby exposing all the media and his political allies as LIARS who'd been endlessly lying about his condition on every TV channel, radio station, and website they had access to. When people hounded Trump (in his first term) to take a cognitive test for the supposed insanity of opposing Democrat plans and policies, he DID. When Joe was falling down, starting his days late and "calling a lid on it" at 10AM or noon, often going days without seeing people outside his inner circle, and needing the White House Easter Bunny to protect him from journalists with questions and HE was hit with demands for a cognitive test, he REFUSED and his party (the one demanding such tests of over political and style differences for Trump) sided with him with many running to microphones and cameras to proclaim his amazing soundness...Remember THIS little gem???

The only thing you were right about is this: "No more "both sides" here, there is a big difference." Only you misunderstood which side was the problem. If the left did not have double-standards, they'd have no standards at all.

in the United States is "equal treatment under law". People who are rich or powerful are not supposed to get away with stuff when average people do not.

I might dislike this jerk and think his company was up to no good, but I have to say I approve of this pardon PRECISELY because I want "Law and Order".

Attorney General Merrick Garland threw the book at Changpeng Zhao for violating the Bank Secrecy Act and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (basically, enabling financial transactions with unsavory people and countries specifically including Iran and failing to warn American regulators properly). I could be wrong, but as I understand it Zhao was not accused of the actual transactions that violated the laws himself, but rather running a company that knowingly allowed others to break that law via his platform. This was the Biden admin AG prosecuting a man for enabling somebody else to transfer money to Iran (a federal crime) at the very same time that President Biden himself was transferring BILLIONS of dollars to both Iran and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Mr Garland also was looking the other way as his boss, Mr Biden was holding the US border wide open, enabling unprecedented flows of drugs and trafficked humans AND doing nothing about remittance payments flowing out of the country, some of which would have been cash flowing to the drug cartels in mayment for the humans and drugs smuggled. Mr Garland also did NOTHING about then-previous president Obama having violated the same federal law in HIS transfer of BILLIONS of dollars to Iran (which historically would be normal, given that by tradition we do not prosecute former presidents for their official acts.... BUT this very same AG Garland threw that tradition out the window and was going after former president Trump (so much for precedent and tradition)).

"Rules for thee, but not for me" is the most basic violation of the very concept of law in the Western world since the signing of the Magna Carta (Look it up if you were under-educated by the public schools within the past 3 or 4 decades).

I would normally have opposed a pardon for such a man, but not pardoning him for these offenses while not prosecuting Obama and Biden was a travesty. People are forgetting that one of the scandals of the Clinton administration was that a businessman named Marc Rich had been, while outside the US, transferring money to Iran (that same federal crime) and could not return to the United States without being arrested and prosecuted. The man missed the funeral of one of his kids because of this exile. His wife Denise Rich donated something like a million dollars to the DNC and the Clintons, and in the final hours [literally] of Bill's time as President, Marc Rich got a Presidential pardon. This seemed very partisan at the time and many conservatives/Republicans went bananas over it as a PARTISAN thing, however in hindsight after it became clear that Dick Cheney's good friend Scooter Libby was involved in the pardon effort, it turns out it was more of an elites vs everybody else thing again... it's that same old abuse of the idea of a "Rule of Law" and it somehow stinks more when it's the top-ranks of the political folks vs everybody else, rather than a partisan fight between people of different parties but essentially the same power and resources...

This: "Republicans have had them blocked from being able to take any effective labor action since Reagan" is dishonest/misleading. Unlike you, I will back up this post with facts.

First: Federal workers (ALL of them) were originally not permitted to unionize. From 1776 to 1962 there were no federal workers unions. For a very simple reason, which everybody understood: Govt workers unionize -> unions fund campaigns of politicians -> politicians sit across table from union that won them election at contract negotiation time -> Voters/taxpayers who fund the whole mess and in whose name it's being done are cut right out and not represented. In such a scheme, the taxpayers get slammed when the union goes on strike - which WILL happen because a strike (or threat thereof) is the primary weapon of a union, or they get slammed as the politicians cave to all the union demands to avoid strikes and to get campaign dollars from those unions. It's a lose-lose for the citizenry.

President John F. Kennedy signed Executive Order 10988 on 17 Jan 1962 (see page 3 of that document which contains several executive orders). Note that strikes by unionized federal workers are specifically prohibited and illegal under that order.

In August of 1981, PATCO (the union representing the air traffic controllers) called a strike. President Reagan, only months into his presidency and working hard to halt the economic nightmare he inherited from Jimmy Carter (double-digit unemployment, double-digit inflation, and double-digit interest rates, a previously unheard of condition in the US) reminded PATCO that the strike was in violation of federal law. A strike at that time that grounded all air traffic would have dealt a massive blow to the economy, so the union figured it would rapidly get what it wanted. Even though this strike was a federal offense, Reagan did not arrest the strikers; he gave them 2 days to stop the strike. The president had previously run the actors' union, so he was quite familiar with unions and knew that if one of these federal worker strikes was allowed, there'd never be an end to what would essentially be blackmailing of the taxpayers. They were convinced they could defeat this newly-elected Republican (like most unions, they'd supported Carter in the election) so they refused to end the strike ("he's just a former B-actor" was their attitude). He fired them. He did NOT arrest and jail them (like Biden did to thousands of Trump supporters decades later). Reagan simply fired them, and they were prohibited from returning to those jobs (they'd definitively proven themselves to be criminals who did not belong in control towers with the lives of millions of innocent civilians in their hands). No other president has faced a nation-wide illegal strike by federal workers in safety-related jobs, and NONE would be able to tolerate it. All presidents since Reagan (in BOTH parties) have had the benefit that Reagan made the point that such strikes which everybody involved KNOW are illegal, will not be tolerated and thus do not happen.

Just what the hell do you think would happen if we let another group of federal workers (the military) unionize? Just how would a war go? Some general tells the Marines to take a particular island, and the Marines say "sorry sir, we're on strike!"???? The country would have no national security at all. Even left wing super hero Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) knew it would be idiotic to allow federal workers to unionize. He was HUGE on unions... in the PRIVATE SECTOR.

As to the pay and working conditions "nightmare" rant: NOBODY is drafted into the FAA and forced to work there. People make a CHOICE to train for a job and then apply and qualify for it, and then take it, and they KNOW the schedules and pay and benefits when they take those jobs. I have never in my life taken a job without knowing the pay and benefits and expected schedules. Nobody with a brain takes such a job. Agreeing to take a job at a particular pay and with particular bennies and then changing your mind and deciding you won't do what you agreed to and that the job is so awful you won't do it BUT so good you will block anybody else from taking the job and doing it, is a rather bizarre thing... but that's the union line on striking. Strikes in the private sector are reasonable and just IF the employer has done something to break the deal made when the employees signed-on. Strikes in the public sector, or strikes where the employer has kept-up his end of the deal but the union simply wants more are another thing altogether.

Look, I get it, some of us think fondly of the "glory days" of NASA when the experimental flights of Gemini and the moon flights of Apollo were underway and we wish for that spirit of great adventure again. I'm firmly in that camp, HOWEVER, the standard arguments always heard in that echo chamber of space fanboys ("NASA is starved for money compared to then", and "NASA is being micromanaged") are both very over-simplified AND just plain erroneous.

On the money issue: The primary argument here is that modern NASA gets a tiny sliver of the federal budget compared to classic NASA. It's a very disingenuous assertion for the following reasons: [1] NASA's budgets back then were only truly massive for the early years, as new facilities were being designed and built all across the nation. Places like the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and the Johnson Space Center in Texas, did not exist. Land had to be bought, facilities designed and built, utilities routed and connected, roads hooded up, etc. At many other facilities like Ames and Glenn and Langley huge new infrastructure projects were added. Then, there were all the new employees added, who needed new training and new HR departments added and procedures created, etc. Then all sorts of new materials and manufacturing and testing methods had to be invented. All of these things exist today and do not need to be invented, designed or built. [2] The Federal budget has BALLOONED since the early 1960s. In 1960, the entire federal budget was $77 Billion. In 2024 the federal budget was $6.8 TRILLION. That's a budget 88 times as big, and NO, we've NOT had 8800% inflation. There's simply NO tie between the ballooning of the size of the social welfare payout programs and interest payments of the US government and how much NASA can do for a dollar. These are unrelated parameters. The proper question is NOT "what percent of the federal budget does NASA get?" it is "How does the current NASA budget compare to back then in inflation-adjusted dollars. (which way adjusted does not matter, use constant 1960 dollars or constant 2024 dollars). Also, many spaceflight advocates forget this: Before Neil Armstrong ever set foot on the Moon, the Johnson administration (which was deep into the Vietnam war, had massively increased social spending as part of the "Great Society" plan, and wrestling with how to pay for everything) effectively cancelled the Apollo program - they cut NASA's budgets and cancelled Saturn V and Apollo CSM and LM production. All the "Apollo Applications Program" studies and concepts were pie-in-the-sky dreaming by an agency struggling with having its future jerked away. Apollo 20 would have been the final one, but after Apollo 13 the politicians got too scared and what would have been Apollo 18 to the moon instead flew unmanned hauling Skylab into Earth orbit, while Apollo 19 and 20 Saturns became static museum displays. The last Saturn IB launchers were used for Skylab crew rotations, and Apollo-Soyuz and museums.

As for "micromanaging"... That's ALWAYS happened to NASA. It's a high-profile federal agency and therefore the plaything of politicians in Washington DC. Nearly every president comes into office, gets pestered about NASA (while usually caring little for it) and announces some changes here or there (with no actual follow-through). The Apollo effort was unique for TWO reasons: [1] Most people THINK it started with JFK's 1962 speech at Rice university in Texas (the famous "We choose to go to the moon" speech) and that AFTER that speech, NASA started thinking about how to build a moon rocket and started designing one and its engines. This is false. The Saturn I rocket started under Eisenhower as the "Juno V" or "Super Jupiter" rocket. The mighty F-1 rocket engine development project was an inked-contract with Rocketdyne in 1959 under Eisenhower. The hardware development for a family of massive new rockets was already well-underway before Kennedy was sworn-in as President, which is NOT to denigrate what he did - JFK gave the project urgency (do it within 10 years) and a direction (the Moon). This all meant that when Kennedy asked Von Braun and the science team for a big space goal that would fit his 10 year timeline, Apollo to the Moon was a possibility. Kennedy's assassination, followed by Johnson's years in office meant NASA was essentially stable and protected for 9 of the 10 required years. Remember: Johnson (when a top Senator) had joined with Eisenhower to create NASA in the first place, so he had a personal stake in it, plus as JFK's vice president he had an additional stake. Nixon got elected right before the 1968 mission of Apollo 8 orbited the moon, and he saw the PR value and international value of the Moon effort, so he basically was hands-off and let it run long enough to get Apollo 11, 12, and 13 done. That's the fabled "not micromanaged" period (during which people in DC definitely WERE micromanaging, but there was a firm fixed goal and project underway). [2] All the Presidents post-Apollo failing to both give NASA a firm-fixed goal and project AND to then put dollars to it AND publicly champion the effort, instead generally leaving the budgets flat, feigning some interest, having a "blue ribbon" committee do some study, put out a report, and mildly recommend something nobody then follows-through upon has left NASA largely adrift and looking like the ball at Wimbledon every time there are congressional hearings.

Love Trump or Despise Trump as you will, what everybody needs to acknowledge is that the very strange politics since 2015 have actually spun very favorably for NASA. In his first Term, Trump (for whatever reason you wish to assume) decided to take that NASA plaything and firmly aim it at the moon and demand it get back there, with his NASA admin and VP kicking the agency hard to get moving. Then in 2020, with Trump gone, nearly the perfect thing happened: a doddering guy with ZERO interest in NASA got into office and just left the place bumping along on auto-pilot. NO "bold" new agenda powerpoints at all. Then in 2024 Trump returns to office (only the 2nd time in US history that a president got 2 non-consecutive terms) sees his NASA program progressing and sees HE will probably be there in office to see the success of the high-profile program, and puts in a new administrator who is not only a "space cadet" but is also competent and a guy who has flown in space... and he urges the guy to drive the project to meet its goals ASAP. This means that for the 2nd time in its history, NASA will have actually been kept on track for a major program long enough to achieve it. I don't personally know whether to be happy with Trump for his two terms, or to his opponents for working so hard to make sure they ended up being non-consecutive terms...

If (and it's a big if) We can get a moon base (even minimal) up before we get a new president who notices NASA, then I suspect that moon base will be the modern version of the Space Shuttle or the ISS: a current-and-constant NASA project that later politicians simply elect to keep operating because it's the easiest course of action for a typical blow hard political animal to do. That meager future alone would be very bright, because a NASA moon base would become the enabler to commercial lunar activity, and once that gets going, the future of manned space activity gets much brighter.

On the upside: Gamers can be quick, hyper-attentive to motion on the screen, adept at recognizing when the paths of screen objects may intercept, completely comfortable seated before a screen gazing at it for many hours without a break, etc. They're also good at quickly learning new sets of rules and adapting to changing conditions.

I'm a bit concerned about that whole "I got killed, now I'm gonna re-spawn" attitude... and the idea of twitchy guys making insane risky moves where, unpredictability is a good thing... [wince]

However, this is in the context of a one-two punch of total insanity that began with Obama's 2011 Executive Order 13583 which in drove all of the federal government to re-orient hiring practices to DEI (causing most agencies, including the FAA, to emphasize race, sex, and orientation over other things in hiring) followed by the Biden administration's Flight Plan 21 Which was FAA-specific and doubled-down on switching the FAA hiring emphasis to things other than training/experience/competence. There are a bunch of lawsuits still underway related to this in which the FAA has been exposed as refusing to hire Caucasian candidates during that administration even if they aced the tests, had previous experience in air traffic control (like former military controllers) and so on because the agency was seeking to "diversify" and was following the ideas on pages 16-19 of the plan (considering junk like the economic status of the communities from which candidates derived).

It's hardly surprising that we've been having so many air traffic control errors recently... we MIGHT be seeing the unfortunate collision of two problems: [1] prioritizing diversity over competence and experience, and [2] the long-standing FAA problem of simply hiring, retaining, and deploying too few controllers (which can mean not enough experienced people to monitor and mentor any new DEI hires who actually might work out ok).

The AI editors and AI "fact checkers" will have been coded by the same people (or, eventually, the same stupid AI programming code) and trained on the same data and will therefore not SPOT the errors, not require the retractions, and almost certainly "fact check" the errors as "true", thereby becoming the obstruction to actual humans correcting things.

AI is likely to produce a new world in which people can believe NOTHING in electronic format, and they need to return to being trustworthy and honest and getting information, and doing transactions, on a handshake with a trusted human, face-to-face.

Congrats to all you people working on stupid large language models and lying to everybody by mis-representing this form of "AI" to the general public as though it were Artificial General Intelligence. You are on the cusp of destroying modernity and forcing society to step backwards 80 years or so. Those of us who worked to bring about the computer revolution INTENDED to build a bright future where computers made everything better, faster, more-efficient, more factual, etc but you are in the process of flushing it all down the giant cosmic toilet. Oh, and before you ask: NO, no additional algorithm can fix this. Algorithms cannot fix human nature, and human nature defaults to abusing every new technology. The current generation of AI is the most-powerful yet least-understood-by-the-public tech to come along. It's already mis-leading people by the millions - just look at the MOUNTAINS of AI slop ruining the YouTube experience already. It only gets worse from here...

We need new drugs for cancer, diabetes, vascular problems, liver problems, rebuilding nerves, destroying proteins and collagens that build up in eyes and blind people, etc. and we have a bunch of drug researchers who are, instead, working to supply a bunch of new (almost certainly addictive) mind-altering drugs to keep people with addictive personalities properly numb?!?

Sheer madness. Probably driven by cash - people will ALWAYS pay for a "high", and some will pay any price to any low-life vendor to live a strung-out life. We'd be better off to create some gated communities and tell people who want to get high to go there and do all the drugs they want within the gates, as long as they never leave without being "clean". Then just legalize all the tried-and-true mind benders for use in those places. Have at it folks! cocaine, heroin, fentanyl, lsd, whatever you want... you just cannot leave and hurt innocent people.

We need drug researchers to be working on serious medications for people with actual serious medical conditions.

Sorry for the rant, but the longer you live, the more decent people you will have known who suffered (and often died) for lack of help with actual serious medical conditions. I no longer am able to muster an ounce of sympathy for anybody who just wants to destroy a few brain cells over a weekend for recreation, and little patience for anybody dedicated to helping them.

you want human beings to ever be anything more than scurrying about on Earth becoming gradually better at killing each other until they eventually succeed or the sun burns out (your choice).

Here's the thing: ANY human voyage to any other place in the universe will be vastly more difficult and dangerous and require more time away from Terra Firma. Therefore, the Moon is a perfect place to learn what we need to learn, and to practice (and get good at) the things we will need to be excellent at in order to manage ANY further exploration. If we cannot get the toilet right on a lunar mission, then any other space destination is right out. We could learn all the same lessons with a destination like Mars, BUT that would be vastly more expensive, and take a huge amount of additional time (each flight would take months vs days, and the launch windows are years apart rather than weeks apart). This is what even Elon Musk has recently surrendered to. When we have mastered the regular lunar flights with sustained time on the lunar surface, we will finally know how to learn to do Mars without going bankrupt and killing lots of crews.

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.