I have had several things over the course of my career that:

1) I was (temporarily) the only one still at the company who knew why it was there

2) I only knew myself because I had reverse engineered it, because the person who put it there had left the company

Now, some of those things had indeed become unnecessary over time (and thus were removed). Some of them, however, have been important (and thus were documented). In aggregate, it's been well worth the effort to do that reverse engineering to classify things properly.

Or C) deploying machines to do almost all of it (developing said machines if necessary). Which is more likely to actually happen than either A or B, even though the current regime is making it difficult. It also won't create very many jobs.

I believe this is the actual plan. They're forcing manufacturing back to America where we will automate the jobs out of existence. This isn't about creating jobs, it's about controlling production.

It's all about power and control.

The claim I think you're referring to is in two parts:

1) They were willing to sell DDoS protection to DDoS services

2) This decision was made specifically because the existence of DDoS services increased the value of their product

This was always a weird claim, because the first part is 100% true -- while the second part was always unfounded speculation. The conclusion is thus most likely false. They just didn't want to incorporate that sort of thing into their ToS or vet their customers in that way, for various understandable reasons.

You jest, but this actually does exist. Multiple CDNs sell multi-CDN load balancing (divide traffic between 2+ CDNs per variously-complicated specifications, with failover) as a value add feature, and IIRC there is at least one company for which this is the marquee feature. It's also relatively doable in-house as these things go.

It's also not exactly the least common way that this sort of huge multi-tenant service goes down. It's only as rare as it is because more or less all of them have had such outages in the past and built generic defenses (e.g. automated testing of customer changes, gradual rollout, automatic rollback, there are others but those are the ones that don't require any further explanation).

So-called "sanctuary cities" have made the judgement that their law enforcement apparatus will be more effective if people who fear immigration authorities are willing to interface with it. They can't and don't stop enforcement actions by federal authorities (see Chicago, right now) - but they view active cooperation with those efforts as detrimental to other law enforcement activities. You might disagree with that assessment, but it is a straightforward exercise of the municipal power to allocate its own resources.

Claiming that they are "there to shelter people who enter the country illegally" is disingenuous at best. In reality, that is neither the goal nor the effect.

The earth also doesn't care about national borders, so why are national numbers more useful in this regard?

Governments have a lot of control over things within their borders, and are held responsible when bad things happen within them.

That was very bad, but it was plausibly authorized by Congress (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorization_for_Use_of_Milit...).

There is no comparable authorization here. There is, to my knowledge, no allegation that these Venezuelans had anything to do with Al Qaida or the Sept. 11 attacks.

Before Trump, a lot fewer. There is a well known phenomenon of GOP governors in deep blue states (e.g. Christie in NJ, Schwarzenegger in CA, Baker in MA, Scott in VT). This is a lot rarer in deep red states. There are a lot more red states than blue ones, but it's still harder (not impossible) to find recent democratic governors of those states. Senators are a bit more proportional, mind you.

Trump has sort of killed this phenomenon - partly because his brand has rubbed off on other Republicans, and partly because they have been running more extreme candidates even in blue states. Before Trump, though, it was not even close.

Operation Warp Speed, the Abraham accords, and this new Gaza ceasefire have all met with near universal praise from the media. It's not the media's fault that the good things he does are so rare.