Credit: Tom Humberstone

In January when President Donald Trump issued an executive order limiting immigration, the news was met with clenched fists in Silicon Valley. On big tech campuses, like Facebook and Google, there were protests, rallies, and boycotts. Of the hundred-some companies that signed an amicus brief protesting the decision, most were tech companies. This sudden political awakening, some argued, was confirmation of tech’s liberal slant. Of course the young employees who populate the Valley bleed blue.

Here’s the other interpretation of what inspired the top rungs of tech companies to stick their necks out in protest: America’s tech industry is wholly reliant on immigrants. Big name founders, from eBay’s Pierre Omidyar to Elon Musk, are immigrants. If you count the first-generation offspring of immigrants, the number grows. (Let’s all remember that Steve Jobs is the child of a Syrian refugee.) Last year, the National Foundation for American Policy released a study of the startups that were worth over a billion dollars. More than half had at least one founder who was an […]

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An abandoned home in La Presa, one of the hundreds of unincorporated towns that dot the U.S.-Mexico border near Laredo, Tex.
Credit: Salwan Georges/The Washington Post

In the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, Americans in Puerto Rico have spent weeks without reliable access to clean water, electricity and cellphone service. The conditions on the ground remain deplorable, with shattered homes and damaged infrastructure everywhere.

But what if hundreds of thousands of Americans lived in these conditions for generations and no one noticed? That’s exactly what some border communities in Texas experience on a daily basis: third-world conditions compounded by public and official indifference to their plight.

In the “colonias” of the American Southwest, hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens have lived without running water for decades (not to mention the lack of electricity, sewage treatment and drainage). Homes are built without regard for safety codes or regulations. The result is structures that look like shacks, hastily built by residents with little money and even less construction expertise.

Some colonia houses have dirt floors and fit a full family in a […]

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Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai will reveal plans to his fellow commissioners on Tuesday to fully dismantle the agency’s Obama-era net neutrality regulations, people familiar with the plans said, in a major victory for the telecom industry in the long-running policy debate. (emphasis added)

The commission will vote on the proposal in December, some seven months after it laid the groundwork for scuttling the rules that require internet service providers like Comcast or AT&T to treat web traffic equally.

President Donald Trump-appointed Pai’s plan would jettison rules that prohibit internet service providers from blocking or slowing web traffic or creating so-called paid internet fast lanes, the people familiar with the changes said.

Pai also will follow through on his plans to scrap the legal foundation that the FCC’s old Democratic majority adopted in 2015 to tighten federal oversight of internet service providers, a move he contends has deterred the industry from investing in broadband networks. Internet providers have feared that legal foundation, if left in place, could set the stage for possible government price regulation of internet service.

The chairman’s approach, […]

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Until recently, humanity has treated the Earth as an infinite resource. As the Earth’s population has exploded over the past century however, we’ve learned in many different ways that that’s untrue. We’ve overfished the ocean, pumped too much carbon into the atmosphere and oceans, driven thousands of species into extinction, and terraformed much of the planet’s land. This periodic table produced by the American Chemical Society shows that there are also 44 chemical elements that will face supply limitations in the coming decades. Among those under a “serious threat in the next 100 years” are silver, helium, zinc, and gallium. Robert Silverberg wrote about The Death of Gallium back in 2008:

Gallium’s atomic number is 31. It’s a blue-white metal first discovered in 1831, and has certain unusual properties, like a very low melting point and an unwillingness to oxidize, that make it useful as a coating for optical mirrors, a liquid seal in strongly heated apparatus, and a substitute for mercury in ultraviolet lamps. It’s also quite important in making the liquid-crystal displays used in flat-screen television […]

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Republican governor of Michigan Rick Snyder

Michigan Governor Rick Snyder (R) has chosen an official charged with obstruction of justice in the Flint water crisis to head up the state’s Public Health Advisory Council.

Wells was expected to appear in court on Tuesday on charges of obstruction of justice and lying to an officer in connection to the Flint water crisis, with threat of manslaughter chargeslooming due to the deaths of Flint residents according to prosecutors.

According to the case against Wells, she illegally interfered with  researchers attempting to study a Legionnaires’ disease outbreak in Genesee County.

In Wells’ new position, should she not be convicted, she would take part in developing a plan to implement the recommendations of the commission, as well as monitoring the effectiveness of Michigan’s public health response system.

Wells is just one of 15 […]

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