My name is Thomas Veil, or at least it was

My child attends a school that bans phones during school hours. It's easy to administer: every kid puts their phone in a phone locker as soon as they enter the school, and every kid retrieves it after the last class. The rare kid who defies the policy is easy to spot, and punished with temporary confiscation. The kids have lost nothing from this policy. They can still communicate with school friends using all the old fashioned methods that 20th century kids used. They still have access to computers, calculators, and cameras in classes where those tools are useful. The kids that I've talked to are happy with the school policy - they see it as fair, and appreciate that they're able to pay attention in school more easily without the distraction of phones.

The question asks if there's "a chance." Of course there is - he's on the ballot!

The latest news from Cuba is that 10% of its population has left the island in the last two years. That's a stunning level of exodus, topped only by nations in total collapse like Venezuela and Syria. And yet, as we have seen in Syria, when a totalitarian regime switches to "bitter end" mode, a nation can get stuck at this level of misery for decades without the hoped for regime change happening. In Cuba, the USA can declare victory. American style capitalism won, Cuban style Marxism lost. It's time to change tactics to bring about the final regime change. If the USA drops its embargo, the Cuban government will lose its last excuse for why its economy's failures are not the government's fault. And allowing free movement of peoples, on the same conditions that the USA applies to other Caribbean nations, will put millions of Cuban citizens face-to-face with happy, wealthy Cuban Americans, living proof that a better way of life is possible for Cuba. And even if it doesn't lead to a regime change in Cuba right away, it's still worthwhile. Cuba would no longer have any incentive to threaten the USA militarily or through terrorism, so there's no downside risk to opening up. And the act of magnanimity would send a strong message to the other nations of the world that the USA is negotiating from a position of confidence and not fear.

2030 is too soon. A one-way trip takes several months, a round trip takes 34 months. No space agency is going to send a manned vessel to Mars without testing it out extensively. If you are really trying to cut down on time and expense, one way to test is to build a completely identical vessel, fill it with supplies, and fire it unmanned at Mars. Well, at the very least you need to wait to see if that unmanned vessel successfully lands on Mars with the supplies intact. And if anything goes wrong with that unmanned vessel, at minimum you're going to need to figure out what went wrong, and re-engineer the manned vessel so that it doesn't suffer the same problem. Long story short, all this construction and testing will take quite a bit of time. And all of the space programs, even China, are quite public about what they are doing. If one of them were planning to land a man on Mars by 2030, they would already be very publicly constructing the test vessel here in 2024.