ELI5: During a police interrogation, can you actually get away with not saying anything until you're provided with a lawyer?

Depends on where you live, but I assume you are talking about the United States.

In the US, the sixth amendment to the constitution says the following:

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

Brewer v. Williams (1979) held that once adversarial proceedings have begun against a defendant, he has a right to legal representation when the government interrogates him.

So basically, yes, it works like it does on TV. At least, it does in the States.

Now, in practical matters, the police are allowed to lie to you. There’s nothing stopping them from trying to convince you that you don’t need a lawyer. You could say to them something like “I think I need a lawyer,” and they could say something like “Why do you need a lawyer? Lawyers are for bad guys. You aren’t a bad guy, are you? We just want to get a bit of information”

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ELI5: Why is so much importance held on the presidential election, but almost no attention is given to Congressional elections?

A)

The do get coverage, but there are a few reasons why they don’t get as much national coverage…

1) Very few races are actually competitive. Between gerrymandering of House districts and states’ entrenched political slants, maybe 50 of the 470 Congressional seats are actually races of any kind.

2) The races that are actual races, all that matters is the local voters. So here in Illinois, there is a lot of coverage of the Mark Kirk/Tammy Duckworth race for Senate because it’s a close race with the incumbent behind in the polls.

3) TRUMP. His constant antics are distracting the media away from everything else, even the more substantive issues of the presidential election. For example, this AM more coverage is going to Trump calling a former Miss Universe fat/Miss Piggy than analysis of the different plans to create jobs presented in the debate last night. 

B) 

It seems like this question was already fairly well answered above but I’d like to add to what he said a bit.

Most congressional races are lightly contested if contested at all. Meaning that very often incumbents have such a substantial lead, through name recognition and having an established track record, that their opponent doesn’t stand much of a chance. Beyond that, it’s not unusual for a strong incumbent to run entirely unopposed simply because any real challenger that would enter the race knows better than to take on a strong incumbent and instead will look for a weaker incumbent in another district or wait until a strong one is nearing retirement.

What’s amazing to me is that congress, as a whole, has an incredibly abysmal approval rating and has for a long time (I don’t know the exact numbers but it usually hovers in the high teens and low 20’s). Americans overwhelmingly feel congress does a poor job but they usually like THEIR congressmen. This is partially because of what the incumbent has done for their own district or state but that’s also part of the problem. Congressmen largely look out for their own electorate to the detriment of the nation as a whole because it gets them reelected. So what people dislike is OTHER congressmen acting selfishly for their districts and neglecting the good of the nation but when it comes to their own district or state people have no complaints.

That, IMO, is why congressional elections aren’t covered nearly as much. Short of a recent scandal, major policy misstep, or shift in local political philosophy, people love their districts and states incumbent politicians and those incumbents are almost guaranteed to win anyway so why bother covering it?

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ELI5: Where do internet providers get their internet from and why can't we make our own?

Answer #1

You can make your own. Go run some fiber from your house to mine.

It costs about $50,000/mile.

We can add others to our network as you get the money.

Answer #2

The Internet is the colloquial term for Interconnected Networks. Your ISP has an arrangement with one or more other companies, who in turn have agreements with yet more companies.

Some of these organizations spend lots of money to run physical cables across the planet in the expectation that their cables will be used to transport information between the two or more points that they connected together.

You can form an organization that connects to existing infrastructure and if you’d on-sell it, your organization is an ISP. You could also set up actual infrastructure, but that’s much more costly and risky.

Different countries have rules about this mainly to do with illegal use that you’ll need to abide by and since this is big business, many roadblocks exist to prevent your little organization from competing with the incumbent.

Some towns and cities, disenchanted with incumbent providers, have started their own networks and succeed in larger and smaller degree in providing their citizens with Internet connectivity. Various freenets also exist which allow information to travel within the group but not to the wider Internet. This often bypasses legal impediments to creating an ISP.

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