Tech people believe in real ID because most tech people are leftists.
Leftists call racists "racists" because under their own set of values that's a horrible thing to say. Imagine if a tech guy was outed as a racist. That'd be the end of his career. Look at what happened to Brendan Eich when it was discovered he doesn't support gay rights.
What they don't understand is that there are more economy sectors other than tech and places other than San Francisco where your life won't be ruined if someone discovers you're a racist. So, real ID is pretty much irrelevant for a big part of the population. That's why it doesn't work.
I like it too but I've found it to be pretty buggy sometimes, especially if the contents of a folder change or the folder itself is deleted while you're viewing it, you get an endless stream of Delphi exceptions.
>The laptop's clearly not "bad" in some objective sense
11.6 inch, 1366 x 768 pixel display, an Allwinner A64 ARM Cortex-A53 quad-core processor with Mali-400MP2 graphics, 1GB of RAM, 4GB of eMMC storage
Everything about that is objectively bad. Those are the regular specs any piece of consumer hardware would have over ten years ago. I'm sure an ancient Pentium 4 would simply crush that processor.
>It's probably subjectively bad to many people, in which case it's clearly not meant for them
What kind of a public would this laptop have? With those specs you can barely run a web browser.
The author of this story flatly ignores the fact that the Lifeline program -- by law -- was never meant to subsidize broadband. It was VERY explicitly intended to subsidize only basic telephone service. Read the law.
If Congress wants there to be a broadband subsidy for the poor, it needs to specifically authorize one. The current law simply does not provide for it, and the FCC needs to obey the law.
Nothing, hence Brexit.