No, the assumption is that you must be 18 years old to apply for a credit card. Surely we could have the machines determine that an "authorized user card" does not guarantee 18+ but the actual card does.
ceejayoz> You want to let every merchant I swipe my card at know my age? To improve privacy?
Remember the site guidelines:
SG> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.
The obvious solution is instead of "every transaction comes with the user's birthday", the vendor can in some way set a minimum age enum of say (13, 15, 18, 21, 25) — a handful of ages that are significant with respect to some law or regulation. Then the transaction succeeds or fails.
The US is behind other democracies which have required photo id for social media and other content. And even if I disagree with these laws, surely you jest that showing a proof of age is not the same thing as surveilling and scoring.
These things are always a slippery slope. They rarely, if ever, achieve their safety goals but they almost always achieve the goals of the corporate interests to garner further data for advertisers and increase surveillance of the populace by the government through proxies that buy said data and then sell to the government.
It is using the proof of age requirement to require a much larger ask -- full proof of identity
Age verification could be done with any of a variety of mathematical systems showing you have a proven age-valid ID but not revealing your identity. But no one is suggesting they build and use such a system.
Outside of Taiwan TSMC foundries are just pumping out already developed non leading edge fab processes. Everyone who matters to TSMC tech development is in Taiwan.
Huge order for... what? DoD's needs for chips are quite modest in quantity. Truth is that the US Gov doesn't need the volume which requires Intel to keep afloat.
GF is a zombie company. Micron and TI are both far far away from leading edge. There is only one American company which is both developing and manufacturing leading edge nodes.
We did so because having all laboratories be government run was inefficient so in WW2 we decided to split the costs with private and public universities who will maintain labs, equipment, and the federal government will pay directly for the research.
The feds are funding research, which elite schools have the best faculty and scholars who are conducting the very best research. May as well as why are VC’s funding promising startups instead of less promising ones, when those promising ones have already wealthy founders who have exited their previous venture.
Obama threatened, but did not make good on those threats. Trump is threatening and actively withholding funds even to Columbia which bent the knee, because these are institutions which are seen as political enemies by the administration.
Amtrak's ridership has been growing and hit an all time high. The Northeast Corridor is a profitable route which is held back by century old infrastructure. If it actually had real high speed spanning the whole route it's ridership absolutely go up. Moreover your comments on not wanting to go from city center to city center are very off. Going from Union Station DC to Penn Station Philly, or NYC is really nice. Have you ever rode Amtrak, specifically that route?
The ridership and convenience of the Acela route is really not representative of the rest of the country.
It's extremely speculative to extrapolate that dense route with the induced demand for travelers going from Kansas City union station to Denver union station... with absolutely nothing in-between.
The new Borealis route (short run of the Empire Builder from Chicago to St. Paul) was profitable in like, weeks, after it started running. It is consistently sold out.
