Yes, and in his great wisdom he appointed Rudy Giuliani as his cybersecurity advisor. Yes, the same Giuliani that doesn't know how links work and thought someone hacked his Twitter account when his typo was linked is the guy that advises the President on computer security matters. Yes, the same Trump that bragged he would "surround myself only with the best and most serious people" and said "we want top-of-the-line professionals" decided to go with the guy who can't even master Twitter as the main policy adviser for security. I know I'll sleep better at night knowing that Rudy is on the case.
I've found as I've advanced in my career, got paid a bit more and have less tube
Sorry to hear about your tube shrinkage. Perhaps you could contact one of the entrepreneurs that are always sending me mail about increasing the size of my tube and get that issue addressed.
There are redundant suits of each size but the secondary medium suit would need to be configured and loaded for the specific spacewalk. They are around 40 years old and you need to be sure everything works correctly before putting it on and going into vacuum - that takes time.
These are EVA suits and are not the same as flight suits and likely would not be used in an emergency since they are difficult to put on and require assistance to do so.
Your experience certainly isn't the norm. If you purchased that car new, it's impossible. Your commute is so short you put less that 5k miles per year on your car, but so long that it spans multiple counties. Your car is much older than average but requires fewer repairs than average. A lot of people pay more than than in just fuel costs each month. Heck, some people's insurance alone is more than that. I have a very similar car and even though I have had no major repairs in all the years I've owned it my per-month cost is higher than that and when purchased it was among the least expensive cars available. Just because your car expenses are abnormally low and your public transit costs would be abnormally high doesn't mean everyone's would be.
I will be taking on the position of Director of Enthusiast Engagement for Intel's Technology Leadership Marketing group," Bennett writes. "Intel wants to reconnect with the top of the high-performance consumer pyramid which contains hardware enthusiasts, overclockers, gamers, and content creators. This is the part of our community that has great influence through word of mouth and online engagement. I'll be focusing on helping Intel get back in touch with this audience and re-establishing a voice and dialog
Wow, he's sure got the corporate marketroid-douchebag speak down pat.
A LOT of Republicans don't care for Trump. Many disliked what Hillary would do to the country slightly more than they disliked Trump, so they held their nose and voted against Hillary, which meant marking "Trump".
If that's the case then why is his approval rating as high as it is? Yeah, 40% isn't great compared to other presidents but it's still 40% of the country saying "yeah, he's doing a good job". I can't fathom how that is even possible but that's what the polls say and I don't have any real reason to disbelieve them. If so many Republicans don't care for him then why do so many say they approve of his actions?
Baseball isn't played if there is inclement weather. You can't just recycle your "self-driving cars will never happen" talking points into your "robot umpires will never happen" post.
Remember that everyone BUT corporations is taxed by revenue, not profits.
What, no Standard Deduction or Itemized Deductions where you live? Which, at least theoretically (yah, it's been a very long time since any attempt was made to update those deductions) is meant to allow for the costs of actually, you know, living and paying your bills.
In other words, no you're taxed on income over and above cost of living (again, it's been a very long time since they adjusted the Standard Deductions and such to actually match a "normal" cost of living for taxpayer and family) - in other words on profit....
By a "very long time" do you mean the 2017 tax legislation when the personal exemption was eliminated and the standard deduction nearly doubled? 2 years isn't a "very long time" when talking about tax policy, it is only 2 tax cycles for individuals. The change was passed in 2017 but it went into effect for the 2018 tax year so it's really only 1 year since the change happened. Prior to that, the standard deduction hadn't changed since 2017, when it went from $6,300 to $6,350. You have to dig REALLY deep for the prior change, when it went from $6,200 to $6,300 in 2015, $6,100 to $6,200 in 2014, $5,950 to $6,100 in 2013, $5,800 to $5,900 in 2012 and $5,700 to $5,800 in 2011. Or in your mind do those updates not meet your personal criteria for "updating those deductions"? These deductions were never supposed to match "normal cost of living", they were supposed to approximate what itemized deductions an average family might take -- things like charitable contributions, education expenses, business expenses and so on. Things that congress decided should be tax-deductible because the activity benefits the country more than the tax revenue would (or that have lots of voters behind it, like deductions for having children).
You misunderstand the reason for standard deductions and exemptions and don't seem to be aware that they have constantly been updated, usually every year.
Because the fire was started by one of their shit cars.
From the fucking summary: "was not caused by Tesla cars, chargers or batteries,". Seriously, the summary is 83 words, you can't read that much before you start spouting off your uninformed opinions?
So a fire in a car showroom is international news now? I don't recall all the stories about fires in Ford or BMW showrooms, although such fires happen. It seems someone still is trying to make people think "Tesla == Fire", most likely someone who has a great deal to lose if Tesla does well.
So I am required to create a custom installer to avoid installing tons of Microsoft crapware?
Yes that is literally what Microsoft requires people to do when rolling out Enterprise Windows.
Do they? I have installed it a number of times but generally don't create a custom installer. Like I said in my previous post (nice reading comprehension BTW) I install from the ISO available on MSDN, so obviously MS doesn't "require" it. It would be incredibly simple to have a setup screen to select which components I do and don't want to install but they decided that didn't fit their marketing goals.
Yes, I've done it before, and it's an incredibly convoluted process.
A process that needs to be done once for however many of thousands of machines you process. I mean we are talking about Windows 10 Enterprise here. You do mean this is a work machine managed in a central IT group right? Because there's no other legal way you'd be running that specific version of Windows you are complaining about.
I don't install thousands of machines, I'm not a Windows sysadmin and never want to be. I install a several machines once in a while for testing software interoperability. Sometimes I use a specific system image but usually I want to install a generic machine with the latest release available.
Which brings me back to my point, why would I ever need XBox software on my Enterprise installation?
Hmmm I wonder if there's any companies you can think of that develop games? Nope I can't think of any either.
What does the pre-installed xbox app have to do with game development? In the words of Microsoft, it's an application to "See what your friends are playing, share and watch game clips, and access Game Hubs for your favorite titles.". What does that have to do with game development? And even if it was for game development, why would it need to be installed on every computer in the enterprise? Game developers (and particularly XBone game developers) are an extremely small subset of users of Windows 10. I get that MS wants to cross-promote their other software and services using my bandwidth and computer resources, but that doesn't mean I like it.
So I am required to create a custom installer to avoid installing tons of Microsoft crapware? Yes, I've done it before, and it's an incredibly convoluted process. Most of my exposure to Windows 10 are installs in a VM lab to test software against different environments. These are ISOs downloaded from MSDN - I shouldn't have to make a custom installer to avoid installing Xbox crap, or Groove Music, or Cortana, or One Note, or Skype, or MS Solitaire Collection, or MS Money, or Movies and TV, or MS News, or the MS Store, or a dozen other things. Yes, it's possible to customize the installation to prevent installing that crap but not during the install, by default it installs everything and each app is constantly downloading massive updates for itself. Which brings me back to my point, why would I ever need XBox software on my Enterprise installation?
Taking all that away just to serve the public relations/"security" interests of Microsoft in fixing their security issues seems an intense, giant waste of human annoyance and time, along with other rational ownership issues..
I would be fine with the updates if they were just for security issues. I'm sick of having to remove all the new Microsoft crapware every time a computer installs its gigabytes of updates. Why the hell does Win10 Enterprise have software for XBox anyway? Fortunately I only have to deal with it at work and at home I can use a reasonable OS where I control the updates but it's still maddening.
Yes, and one of the answers to the question is "I do not wish to furnish this information". They ask, but you are not required to answer. I see no reason to answer unless you believe your race will help your application.
An even better example is Donald Trump. In 1995, he claimed a loss of $916 million on his personal tax return. But he didn't lose a billion dollars. His company didn't even lose a billion dollars. The banks that lent him the money that he lost on his horrible property deals were the ones that realized the loss. From TFA:
Investors, for example, can walk away from a property and record the investment as a loss — even if they were playing with borrowed money. While a profit from that same property would be treated as a capital gain, losses are treated as “operating losses” under a tax code provision that dates back to the Great Depression. Those losses can be deployed far more flexibly than capital losses to shield other income from taxation.
“He was forced to sell many of his investments in the early 1990s, at pennies on the dollar, teetering on bankruptcy,” Edward Kleinbard, a tax expert at the University of Southern California, said of Mr. Trump. “There were real economic losses from those investments — borne entirely by the lenders. Yet nonetheless he was able to emerge with a large net operating loss to carry forward, attributable primarily to losing other people’s money.”
Not to mention the fact that any money that he acquired previous to that (mostly from his father) wasn't taxed either, partially by exploiting the current laws and in some cases just flaunting them to dodge taxes. Things like vastly understating the value of property that his father was transferring to Donald in order to avoid gift taxes, setting up sham corporations to funnel money to Donald and his siblings and getting paid large sums of money for "property management" services when Donald was just 3 years old. Some of the techniques were legal, some were of questionable legality and some were blatantly illegal. But rich people have armies of lawyers to besiege the IRS when anything is questioned so they rarely are held accountable even for the small fraction of tax frauds that are discovered.
And the whole reason that some of these tax schemes are legal is because the government is owned by the rich and powerful, they basically shape any tax legislation to their ends. Rich people have obscure methods for shielding their income from taxes because they wrote the laws that created those methods. It takes a hell of a lot of landscapers under reporting their income to equal the taxes dodged by one billionaire.
The US already has this, but since it's a car-based culture it uses automatic license plate recognition rather than facial recognition. The police have these cameras EVERYWHERE. They then give the data to private corporations and buy it back as a "service" so they don't have to deal with any pesky data retention restrictions or FOIA requests. Big brother is here, and even though he has a record of where anyone who has a car traveled he always wants more. Think of the children! Law enforcement needs a backdoor into anything encrypted or pedos are going to rape your kids! The American sheep don't care, their attitude is "I'm not a pedo so what does it matter to me?" while we slide deeper and deeper into totalitarianism and a police state.
1. Collective bargaining benefits exist in the US also. Insurance companies pay much lower prices than those cited, exactly because of their bargaining power. The costs you're discussing are costs outside of the insurance system, and as such aren't really comparable to anything in nations which control all sale/distribution.
The largest purchaser of drugs in the US (Medicare part D, passed by Republicans in 2003) is not allowed to negotiate prices with pharma companies. The very people who crow about the "free market" being the solution to high drug costs pass laws that prohibit free market actions. The Democrats are no better, the individual mandate in the ACA was a huge handout to insurance companies. We need to start electing politicians whose first question isn't "how will this legislation funnel money to companies that contribute to my campaigns?", but "will this be good for the PEOPLE of the country?". It's really a hopeless cause, there will never be more than 2 viable parties with this voting system and the people elected will always be beholden to corporations and wealthy individuals who fund their campaigns because the only people who can change the system are the very people who gain and maintain power with the status quo. As long as they keep the masses at each other's throats with manufactured "issues" (like gun control, immigration, or abortion) so they'll reliably vote for someone just because they have an (R) or (D) next to their name there's no way change will happen and the American government will continue to just be another way to funnel money from the masses to corporations.
And even if you manage to accelerate the crowbar enough to drop straight down, it would vaporize before it hit the ground.
Not necessarily, particularly since you wouldn't want to drop it straight down. You get to choose the entry trajectory and the trajectory that uses the least delta-v also has the best profile for entry (dropping the perigee just low enough that the rod re-enters). A steel rod has a good ballistic coefficient so it won't heat nearly as much as most of the objects that enter the atmosphere (space vehicles, asteroids, etc.). And even if part of the rod ablates away as long as a decent portion still strikes the target the weapon would be effective, there isn't a ton of difference between getting hit with 20 KG of steel at orbital velocities vs. 15 KG of molten steel and 5 KG of white-hot iron plasma.
Do you have a source for that? This source says that New York's per capita federal tax is $8,849.66 and North Dakota's is $6,690.84. Doesn't seem like such "simple terms" to me.
I don't believe it's illegal, but it's voluntary. I rarely stop for such people, if they ask for my receipt before leaving I generally cheerfully say "no thanks" and continue walking. Only once or twice have they even made any further efforts to stop me and it's has never gone beyond "you don't have my permission to search my belongings". They know that it's voluntary, and if you refuse to participate the receipt checker is unlikely to escalate the situation. In theory, they could tell you that you're not allowed to come back and have the police give you a trespass warning but that's highly unlikely.
Medicaid is not what the figure you quoted represents. I read the Forbes article from which your source drew its data and the majority of the cited costs are not Medicaid. You're misrepresenting the data. The article includes all kinds of indirect costs like forgone tax revenue and tax advantaged bond financing from non-profit hospitals, tax breaks for insurance provided as employee benefits or unpaid emergency room visits causing higher costs for all patients. It even includes $1.5 billion in charity care voluntarily given by physicians as a "cost". It doesn't show any evidence that illegal immigrants are using that healthcare, it just takes the total costs from a number of areas then assumes illegals use the same amount as legal residents and ascribes that cost to them. Even the author recognizes the shakiness of his figures:
I recognize these back-of-the-envelope figures are crude, but they are the best estimates I could make
Whatever the case, your assertion of "18.5 billion in Medicaid" is wrong and not even supported by your own source.
Besides, even if it's not perfect, a one-time $5 billion is peanuts compared to the cost of hosting illegal immigrants. Even the liberal politifact says the costs is between $43 to $279 billion per year
Those numbers aren't referring to illegal immigrants, they are referring to ALL immigrants. Illegal immigrants are a small subset of the total and are not eligible for most of the government assistance that is available for legal immigrants.
Slashdot Mirror
You want to vote for this guy, or someone creating a Space Force?
Besides, Trump already issued a National Cyber Strategy, and there is already a joint military Cyber Force.
Yes, and in his great wisdom he appointed Rudy Giuliani as his cybersecurity advisor. Yes, the same Giuliani that doesn't know how links work and thought someone hacked his Twitter account when his typo was linked is the guy that advises the President on computer security matters. Yes, the same Trump that bragged he would "surround myself only with the best and most serious people" and said "we want top-of-the-line professionals" decided to go with the guy who can't even master Twitter as the main policy adviser for security. I know I'll sleep better at night knowing that Rudy is on the case.
in most of USA drivers are crucified (sometimes literally) for hitting a pedestrian.
Can you show a single instance where a driver was literally crucified for hitting a pedestrian?
I've found as I've advanced in my career, got paid a bit more and have less tube
Sorry to hear about your tube shrinkage. Perhaps you could contact one of the entrepreneurs that are always sending me mail about increasing the size of my tube and get that issue addressed.
He was the regional manager at Dunder-Mifflin in Scranton, PA so no, he wasn't punished for that or any of the other incidents that were much worse.
There are redundant suits of each size but the secondary medium suit would need to be configured and loaded for the specific spacewalk. They are around 40 years old and you need to be sure everything works correctly before putting it on and going into vacuum - that takes time.
These are EVA suits and are not the same as flight suits and likely would not be used in an emergency since they are difficult to put on and require assistance to do so.
Personally my car costs average $100/mo
Your experience certainly isn't the norm. If you purchased that car new, it's impossible. Your commute is so short you put less that 5k miles per year on your car, but so long that it spans multiple counties. Your car is much older than average but requires fewer repairs than average. A lot of people pay more than than in just fuel costs each month. Heck, some people's insurance alone is more than that. I have a very similar car and even though I have had no major repairs in all the years I've owned it my per-month cost is higher than that and when purchased it was among the least expensive cars available. Just because your car expenses are abnormally low and your public transit costs would be abnormally high doesn't mean everyone's would be.
Wow, he's sure got the corporate marketroid-douchebag speak down pat.
A LOT of Republicans don't care for Trump. Many disliked what Hillary would do to the country slightly more than they disliked Trump, so they held their nose and voted against Hillary, which meant marking "Trump".
If that's the case then why is his approval rating as high as it is? Yeah, 40% isn't great compared to other presidents but it's still 40% of the country saying "yeah, he's doing a good job". I can't fathom how that is even possible but that's what the polls say and I don't have any real reason to disbelieve them. If so many Republicans don't care for him then why do so many say they approve of his actions?
And that's on a clear day.
Baseball isn't played if there is inclement weather. You can't just recycle your "self-driving cars will never happen" talking points into your "robot umpires will never happen" post.
What, no Standard Deduction or Itemized Deductions where you live? Which, at least theoretically (yah, it's been a very long time since any attempt was made to update those deductions) is meant to allow for the costs of actually, you know, living and paying your bills.
In other words, no you're taxed on income over and above cost of living (again, it's been a very long time since they adjusted the Standard Deductions and such to actually match a "normal" cost of living for taxpayer and family) - in other words on profit....
By a "very long time" do you mean the 2017 tax legislation when the personal exemption was eliminated and the standard deduction nearly doubled? 2 years isn't a "very long time" when talking about tax policy, it is only 2 tax cycles for individuals. The change was passed in 2017 but it went into effect for the 2018 tax year so it's really only 1 year since the change happened. Prior to that, the standard deduction hadn't changed since 2017, when it went from $6,300 to $6,350. You have to dig REALLY deep for the prior change, when it went from $6,200 to $6,300 in 2015, $6,100 to $6,200 in 2014, $5,950 to $6,100 in 2013, $5,800 to $5,900 in 2012 and $5,700 to $5,800 in 2011. Or in your mind do those updates not meet your personal criteria for "updating those deductions"? These deductions were never supposed to match "normal cost of living", they were supposed to approximate what itemized deductions an average family might take -- things like charitable contributions, education expenses, business expenses and so on. Things that congress decided should be tax-deductible because the activity benefits the country more than the tax revenue would (or that have lots of voters behind it, like deductions for having children).
You misunderstand the reason for standard deductions and exemptions and don't seem to be aware that they have constantly been updated, usually every year.
Because the fire was started by one of their shit cars.
From the fucking summary: "was not caused by Tesla cars, chargers or batteries,". Seriously, the summary is 83 words, you can't read that much before you start spouting off your uninformed opinions?
So a fire in a car showroom is international news now? I don't recall all the stories about fires in Ford or BMW showrooms, although such fires happen. It seems someone still is trying to make people think "Tesla == Fire", most likely someone who has a great deal to lose if Tesla does well.
So I am required to create a custom installer to avoid installing tons of Microsoft crapware?
Yes that is literally what Microsoft requires people to do when rolling out Enterprise Windows.
Do they? I have installed it a number of times but generally don't create a custom installer. Like I said in my previous post (nice reading comprehension BTW) I install from the ISO available on MSDN, so obviously MS doesn't "require" it. It would be incredibly simple to have a setup screen to select which components I do and don't want to install but they decided that didn't fit their marketing goals.
Yes, I've done it before, and it's an incredibly convoluted process.
A process that needs to be done once for however many of thousands of machines you process. I mean we are talking about Windows 10 Enterprise here. You do mean this is a work machine managed in a central IT group right? Because there's no other legal way you'd be running that specific version of Windows you are complaining about.
I don't install thousands of machines, I'm not a Windows sysadmin and never want to be. I install a several machines once in a while for testing software interoperability. Sometimes I use a specific system image but usually I want to install a generic machine with the latest release available.
Which brings me back to my point, why would I ever need XBox software on my Enterprise installation?
Hmmm I wonder if there's any companies you can think of that develop games? Nope I can't think of any either.
What does the pre-installed xbox app have to do with game development? In the words of Microsoft, it's an application to "See what your friends are playing, share and watch game clips, and access Game Hubs for your favorite titles.". What does that have to do with game development? And even if it was for game development, why would it need to be installed on every computer in the enterprise? Game developers (and particularly XBone game developers) are an extremely small subset of users of Windows 10. I get that MS wants to cross-promote their other software and services using my bandwidth and computer resources, but that doesn't mean I like it.
So I am required to create a custom installer to avoid installing tons of Microsoft crapware? Yes, I've done it before, and it's an incredibly convoluted process. Most of my exposure to Windows 10 are installs in a VM lab to test software against different environments. These are ISOs downloaded from MSDN - I shouldn't have to make a custom installer to avoid installing Xbox crap, or Groove Music, or Cortana, or One Note, or Skype, or MS Solitaire Collection, or MS Money, or Movies and TV, or MS News, or the MS Store, or a dozen other things. Yes, it's possible to customize the installation to prevent installing that crap but not during the install, by default it installs everything and each app is constantly downloading massive updates for itself. Which brings me back to my point, why would I ever need XBox software on my Enterprise installation?
Taking all that away just to serve the public relations/"security" interests of Microsoft in fixing their security issues seems an intense, giant waste of human annoyance and time, along with other rational ownership issues..
I would be fine with the updates if they were just for security issues. I'm sick of having to remove all the new Microsoft crapware every time a computer installs its gigabytes of updates. Why the hell does Win10 Enterprise have software for XBox anyway? Fortunately I only have to deal with it at work and at home I can use a reasonable OS where I control the updates but it's still maddening.
Yes, and one of the answers to the question is "I do not wish to furnish this information". They ask, but you are not required to answer. I see no reason to answer unless you believe your race will help your application.
An even better example is Donald Trump. In 1995, he claimed a loss of $916 million on his personal tax return. But he didn't lose a billion dollars. His company didn't even lose a billion dollars. The banks that lent him the money that he lost on his horrible property deals were the ones that realized the loss. From TFA:
Not to mention the fact that any money that he acquired previous to that (mostly from his father) wasn't taxed either, partially by exploiting the current laws and in some cases just flaunting them to dodge taxes. Things like vastly understating the value of property that his father was transferring to Donald in order to avoid gift taxes, setting up sham corporations to funnel money to Donald and his siblings and getting paid large sums of money for "property management" services when Donald was just 3 years old. Some of the techniques were legal, some were of questionable legality and some were blatantly illegal. But rich people have armies of lawyers to besiege the IRS when anything is questioned so they rarely are held accountable even for the small fraction of tax frauds that are discovered.
And the whole reason that some of these tax schemes are legal is because the government is owned by the rich and powerful, they basically shape any tax legislation to their ends. Rich people have obscure methods for shielding their income from taxes because they wrote the laws that created those methods. It takes a hell of a lot of landscapers under reporting their income to equal the taxes dodged by one billionaire.
The US already has this, but since it's a car-based culture it uses automatic license plate recognition rather than facial recognition. The police have these cameras EVERYWHERE. They then give the data to private corporations and buy it back as a "service" so they don't have to deal with any pesky data retention restrictions or FOIA requests. Big brother is here, and even though he has a record of where anyone who has a car traveled he always wants more. Think of the children! Law enforcement needs a backdoor into anything encrypted or pedos are going to rape your kids! The American sheep don't care, their attitude is "I'm not a pedo so what does it matter to me?" while we slide deeper and deeper into totalitarianism and a police state.
1. Collective bargaining benefits exist in the US also. Insurance companies pay much lower prices than those cited, exactly because of their bargaining power. The costs you're discussing are costs outside of the insurance system, and as such aren't really comparable to anything in nations which control all sale/distribution.
The largest purchaser of drugs in the US (Medicare part D, passed by Republicans in 2003) is not allowed to negotiate prices with pharma companies. The very people who crow about the "free market" being the solution to high drug costs pass laws that prohibit free market actions. The Democrats are no better, the individual mandate in the ACA was a huge handout to insurance companies. We need to start electing politicians whose first question isn't "how will this legislation funnel money to companies that contribute to my campaigns?", but "will this be good for the PEOPLE of the country?". It's really a hopeless cause, there will never be more than 2 viable parties with this voting system and the people elected will always be beholden to corporations and wealthy individuals who fund their campaigns because the only people who can change the system are the very people who gain and maintain power with the status quo. As long as they keep the masses at each other's throats with manufactured "issues" (like gun control, immigration, or abortion) so they'll reliably vote for someone just because they have an (R) or (D) next to their name there's no way change will happen and the American government will continue to just be another way to funnel money from the masses to corporations.
And even if you manage to accelerate the crowbar enough to drop straight down, it would vaporize before it hit the ground.
Not necessarily, particularly since you wouldn't want to drop it straight down. You get to choose the entry trajectory and the trajectory that uses the least delta-v also has the best profile for entry (dropping the perigee just low enough that the rod re-enters). A steel rod has a good ballistic coefficient so it won't heat nearly as much as most of the objects that enter the atmosphere (space vehicles, asteroids, etc.). And even if part of the rod ablates away as long as a decent portion still strikes the target the weapon would be effective, there isn't a ton of difference between getting hit with 20 KG of steel at orbital velocities vs. 15 KG of molten steel and 5 KG of white-hot iron plasma.
Do you have a source for that? This source says that New York's per capita federal tax is $8,849.66 and North Dakota's is $6,690.84. Doesn't seem like such "simple terms" to me.
Using DC means it's not a transmission line.
"This article is about the radio-frequency transmission line. For the power transmission line, see electric power transmission."
I don't believe it's illegal, but it's voluntary. I rarely stop for such people, if they ask for my receipt before leaving I generally cheerfully say "no thanks" and continue walking. Only once or twice have they even made any further efforts to stop me and it's has never gone beyond "you don't have my permission to search my belongings". They know that it's voluntary, and if you refuse to participate the receipt checker is unlikely to escalate the situation. In theory, they could tell you that you're not allowed to come back and have the police give you a trespass warning but that's highly unlikely.
$18.5 billion in Medicaid for illegal immigrants. That's just healthcare - and it's nearly 4X this ask for the wall. ILLEGAL immigrants, not legal.
Medicaid is not what the figure you quoted represents. I read the Forbes article from which your source drew its data and the majority of the cited costs are not Medicaid. You're misrepresenting the data. The article includes all kinds of indirect costs like forgone tax revenue and tax advantaged bond financing from non-profit hospitals, tax breaks for insurance provided as employee benefits or unpaid emergency room visits causing higher costs for all patients. It even includes $1.5 billion in charity care voluntarily given by physicians as a "cost". It doesn't show any evidence that illegal immigrants are using that healthcare, it just takes the total costs from a number of areas then assumes illegals use the same amount as legal residents and ascribes that cost to them. Even the author recognizes the shakiness of his figures:
Whatever the case, your assertion of "18.5 billion in Medicaid" is wrong and not even supported by your own source.
Besides, even if it's not perfect, a one-time $5 billion is peanuts compared to the cost of hosting illegal immigrants. Even the liberal politifact says the costs is between $43 to $279 billion per year
Those numbers aren't referring to illegal immigrants, they are referring to ALL immigrants. Illegal immigrants are a small subset of the total and are not eligible for most of the government assistance that is available for legal immigrants.