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> a system where each President appoints (with Senate consent) one and only one justice to SCOTUS.

This is my only significant disagreement with you. This should be two justices:

1) An 18-year (9*2) term is more compatible with age limits than a 36-year term

2) Each Senate class gets to participate in the appointment of one justice.

Your latter point belies the former: The the trade-off is only worth it if the data centers are used for purposes that benefit humanity. As yet, all we've seen them used for is wealth consolidation (through labor force reduction), mass surveillance, hacking, and other antisocial behaviors. There's no reason to believe those won't persist as the profit-maximizing use cases.

You can get LTSPICE to do the simulation for you, but it will be much harder to understand why an interesting circuit works (such that you can adjust it or implement it with real components) without understanding some of the calculus behind the simulation.

Plenty of places operate much more dense transit without that level of security.

Trains, even HSR have essentially zero hijacking risk relative to airplanes, and proper safety interlocks make them very difficult to use the vehicle as a weapon.

At that point, your terrorism risk is approximately on level with any other dense transportation interconnect.

The biggest difference to hijackings post 9/11 has nothing to do with pre-boarding security: Locking the cockpit door.

That's how both the SBS buses in NYC used to work (before tap to pay), and how the NJ Transit light rail still works.

Your last point was that some people prefer to rent. I don't think it's irrelevant to compare that to the number of people who would prefer to own.

Assuming the same homes, which group do you think is larger:

A) Households who are currently renting who would prefer to own their home

B) Households who currently own who would prefer to be renting

I'm going to guess A >>> B, but I've never seen the data.

What's wild about this is that it makes really obvious how limited our perspective on dinosaur biodiversity is. Our best view on the best-known dinosaurs comes from a few places that were really good for finding fossils from specific eras.

Presumably the browser still has to fetch the page in that case, right? From a "surveilled net traffic" perspective, how is that different than clicking the link?

What's the market share for non-system-default browsers and/or email clients?

My watch (Garmin VivoActive 4) lasts ~1 week. The charger is one less thing I have to:

- keep on my nightstand

- take with me if I go away for a few days

It wouldn't be the worst thing to build charging it into my daily routine, but it sure is liberating to not need to.

Not just ethnic groups. Schools mostly can't say "we only want rich people" but they definitely want to prefer students who will contribute to the donation revenue stream either themselves or through their parents. Signals like "doesn't have a job to take up their time in high school" and "parents can afford (and have the free time to enable) expensive, time-consuming activities" are really good proxies for that.

> Drug users don't seem to be overly preoccupied with what drug they use.

What? In the case of opiates (which is the most significant drug problem we have at the moment), users are often physically addicted to a specific substance and that addiction was often initiated by legitimate medical usage of that substance. They'll certainly care if you say "hey, you can't use heroin any more, have some weed instead".

In the US, we usually refer to "paying someone to borrow a car" as a car "rental" and "borrowing money to finance a car purchase" as a car "loan".