> I personally have a hard time believing that a “Real” ID that does not verify citizenship or residency is meaningfully different from my current one.
You seem to have conveniently forgotten that residency was part of the discussion. DHS hasn't contested REAL ID as a means to verify your identity or your residency. They have contested it as a means to verify your citizenship and they are correct because it was never intended to be proof of citizenship or legal residency status.
You do need to show your residency paperwork or prove citizenship when applying as only lawfully present residents are eligible to receive a REAL ID, but only citizens and permanent residents have indefinite legal status and REAL ID doesn't track your status.
I would argue this is a silly gap, but Congress intentionally did not establish a National ID which you would expect to identify nationality. Instead, they created a system which makes it difficult to create ID in multiple states concurrently or under multiple names.
I would further argue that the database required to make REAL ID work ends up with all of the negatives of a national ID, without the most useful benefits. So really, we all lose.
That's a really disappointing source. The headline is '200,000 people a day fly without REAL-ID', which starts out quite interesting.
It then goes on to explain that the TSA has reported 93% of traveler's complied with REAL ID, citing a TSA blog from a week prior which in fact states the same.
They then take this and couple it with a single day, which they state was the busiest travel day of the Memorial Day weekend, and extrapolate that 7% of the travelers that day must've failed to provide a REAL ID.
For the sake of conversation, this is a reasonable statement. Going back and using it to suggest 200k fly without it on a typical day is not reasonable, nor is your suggestion that a 6 months later it's still at 7% (or even typical travel volume hasn't changed.) There has to be better data available.
I was curious about this, so I looked up travel volume. YTD the daily average is 2,130,136 passengers. At 7%, this is 149,109.5 passengers or $2.449 B a year in fees. This ignores that you only pay the fee once very 10 days and assumes that all travelers pay the fee on every occurrence.
The most recent press release from the TSA claims that it's now 6% of passengers not showing ID or not showing REAL ID: https://www.tsa.gov/news/press/releases/2025/12/01/tsa-intro... So down only slightly since May 2025 when they started "enforcing" a "requirement" to show REAL-ID.
So, 1 to 2 billion dollars, depending on how many round trips are above or below 10 days. You're right, I thought this was real money, like 3 billion. But 1 to 2 billion? You find that between the couch cushions every week. I'm so glad people like you are out there debunking these ridiculous claims.
This is such an odd point that some of you are arguing. You’re nitpicking numbers (some of you incorrectly) and sidestepping the main issue entirely. None of you are providing sources, you’re just handwaving away saying “this will barely impact anybody” basically. It’s such an odd argument and I don’t get the point.
The point is that lots of people will pay this fee and it will equal a large amount of money and it does nothing of value. It’s just a fee for the fee’s sake. It serves no practical purpose, it’s just punitive.
What is the actual legitimate purpose of this fee that millions will likely pay? Almost half the country flies annually and multiple states don’t require a RealID in the first place. So we’re talking millions of people, some of which will pay it multiple times, per year until full compliance. This is built to net a consequential amount of money and it doesn’t seem like it’s for any purpose other than to generate revenue at people’s expense.
It does not make flying safer. It doesn’t even pretend to make flying safer. It doesn’t cover some cost. You can fly without it.
It’s an arbitrary tax that will mostly be paid by people who can’t or won’t take the time to go to the DMV to get an ID that is not even required to replace the perfectly good one they already have. At the end of the day this is why nobody has gotten it! They keep saying you need to get it (years now) but you don’t actually need to. If it’s that important then they should say “you cannot get on an airplane without one.” But it isn’t, so they don’t, and now that’s just a revenue opportunity.
What states do you have to pay for your Real ID every time? Yes, you have to pay to renew your license or photo ID, but the Real ID fee in my state (PA) is one-time. Renewal costs are the same whether it's a Real ID or not.
to add, fee for Real ID marker on Limited Term license covers 5 years, so if one gets lets say a license for 2 years (& had to pay for 5 years), the next renewals/updates within those 5 years are free.
Why are almost every one of your comments since you signed up angry criticism, except for the ones where you demonstrate deep knowledge of the Russian language?
This is a curious suggestion. Higher end go-karts I can't contest, but I've never found bumper cars to be anything like operating a car. It would probably help, but at some point they're going to need to drive something with more weight and horsepower.
> This is a curious suggestion. Higher end go-karts I can't contest, but I've never found bumper cars to be anything like operating a car.
A unique simulation bumper cars can provide is in collision avoidance and real-time steering/acceleration/braking skills. The value of this is relative and dependent upon a person using time in a bumper car with intent to hone driving skills.
Russian is neither a common lingua franca nor is it commonly spoken by foreigners (with the obvious exclusion of former Soviet countries). It belongs culturally to Russia and it's people. English belongs to half a dozen countries.
I'm not sure I agree with the original commenter, but I see the merit in their perspective.
Is English commonly spoken by countries that aren't former British colonies? I am a Ukranian citizen, and if I can speak Russian, and not have that kind of prejudice, you should also be able to. In fact most Ukrainians speak Russian.
To answer your question directly, yes. By population, 55% of Germany, 57% of France, 49% of Poland, 51% of Ukraine, 90% of the Netherlands, 89% of Sweden, 73% of Austria, 30% of Romania, 39% of Croatia [0]. Apologies in advance if any of these countries are former British colonies, I don't claim to be knowledgeable on world history.
It's true that Ukranian is more prevalent in western Ukraine, but that is a minority. Most people live in Kyiv, and prefer to speak Russian, including the current president of Ukraine. Or at least this was the case before the war started, and a huge chunk of population left the country.
let me guess, they consumed spiked up oranges ? and you are the only one who could resist it ? and russia launching war in the middle of the night has absolutely nothing to do with it ?
> Exactly that gives ruskies propaganda talking points to invade Ukraine by saying they don’t like how Ukrainians treated russian speakers.
The Russians have a point there. I wish the Russian language was an official language in Ukraine, and I wish I could speak Russian in Ukraine without restrictions, but unfortunately the Ukranian government chose to instead try and force people to speak Ukranian at school, etc. But that obviously doesn't justify starting a war.
> British King isn’t delusional enough to start war with neighboring English speaking country.
Do they even have a neighbouring country that speaks English? They are dumb enough to quit EU though.
Wishing a national identity and sovereignty did not exist just for your convenience is what this thread is about.
> I wish I could speak Russian in Ukraine without restrictions
There weren't meaningful restrictions. A large number of Ukrainians still speak Russian a lot. Instead this sounds like "forcing" a number of people to speak to you in a particular language in order for you to not feel "restricted".
I was forced to speak Ukranian at school. Is this not a meaningful restriction to you?
> Instead this sounds like "forcing" a number of people to speak to you in a particular language in order for you to not feel "restricted".
Unlike Ukranian government, I never forced anyone to speak any particular language. In fact, what happens when one person prefers to speak Ukrainian, and the other person prefers to speak Russian, is they just do, and they both understand each other just fine.
100%. I saw some vids from Ukrainian frontlines where people say speaking Russian is a problem because in fast situations it's more difficult to identify if you're enemy. This means even there some people speak Russian
It's just about education in schools and official use. And it's crazy to blame a country for requiring using its home language at schools
Tons of people totally speak English there. But it's not an official language. And government totally forces kids to speak French/Dutch/whatever in schools. if England invades Netherland will you say they also have a point?;)
The point is that Ukraine used to be a part of Soviet Union, and this is why "obviously" Ukranians speak Russian, and we are drawing a parallel to how former British colonies also speak English. France et al are not former British colonies, and I assume they prefer to speak their native language at home, and not English. Not because they are forced to, but because English is not their native language.
The propagation of English is due to the influence of America and Britain. If you look at the history of what those two have been up to all around the world, it's not pretty.
That's an interesting data point, but I don't think it's relevant. The datacenters themselves are designed with a high level of power reliability and can island themselves if needed.
This is an interesting point. As recently as mid-2023 us-east-2 was 3 campuses with a 5 building design capacity at each. I know they've expanded by multiples since, but us-east-1 would still dwarf them.
Makes one wonder, does us-west-2 have the capacity to take on this surge?
I may be missing something, but it is almost a guarantee that you would not receive a RA in this scenario? eduroam is using WPA2/WPA3 enterprise, so my understanding is that until you authenticate to the network you do not have L2 network access.
Additionally, eduroam uses certificate auth baked into the provisioning profile to ensure you are authenticating using your organizations IdP. (There are some interesting caveats to this statement that they discuss in https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7593#section-7.1.1 and the mitigation is the usage of Private CAs for cert signing).
> I personally have a hard time believing that a “Real” ID that does not verify citizenship or residency is meaningfully different from my current one.
You seem to have conveniently forgotten that residency was part of the discussion. DHS hasn't contested REAL ID as a means to verify your identity or your residency. They have contested it as a means to verify your citizenship and they are correct because it was never intended to be proof of citizenship or legal residency status.
You do need to show your residency paperwork or prove citizenship when applying as only lawfully present residents are eligible to receive a REAL ID, but only citizens and permanent residents have indefinite legal status and REAL ID doesn't track your status.
I would argue this is a silly gap, but Congress intentionally did not establish a National ID which you would expect to identify nationality. Instead, they created a system which makes it difficult to create ID in multiple states concurrently or under multiple names.
I would further argue that the database required to make REAL ID work ends up with all of the negatives of a national ID, without the most useful benefits. So really, we all lose.