When Farrah Farley quit her job with the Department of Justice to campaignfor Hillary Clinton, she never worried about losing her healthcare. After all, she was a competent worker who knew could prove herself quickly so long as she got a foot in the door. And just as she predicted, after only a few weeks, the 32-year-old was promoted from volunteer to field manager. The shift in gigs resulted in barely a disruption in her insurance coverage—which was good, because for a decade she's been taking Lipitor to treat a high-cholesterol condition she's had since birth. During the next few months, her candidate stayed solidly ahead in the polls, which made the Georgetown graduate confident that Obama-era policies would continue. Essentially, she felt confident that whatever healthcare she ended up with post-election would be sufficient for her needs, and would only get better with time and further reforms.

But then, on November 9, Farley was blindsided in the same way that much of America was. She also found herself in a position that she never expected, one in which she was suddenly worried about whether she will still have access to Lipitor in the future.

"It keeps me from having a stroke at 34," Farley says. "I still am kinda in the denial stage of grief."

Farley's relationship to the election may be unusually intimate, but she's far from alone in her anxiety about insurance in the wake of Donald Trump's victory, which all but guaranteed the Affordable Care Act's repeal and major changes to the health insurance market. Although congressional Republicans' precise plan to repeal and replace the existing law remains vague, they've long promised to wipe out the Obamacare regime. That could potentially leave millions without insurance, and even if Republicans delayed the implementation of the repeal, the Obamacare exchanges where the uninsured can buy plans would be decimated. For many Americans, this means that the future of their healthcare is suddenly up in the air.

Obamacare provided insurance to the previously uninsured in several ways. According to a March report by the Department of Health and Human Services, 6.1 million people between the ages of 19 and 25 used a provision of the ACA to stay on their parents' health insurance. A RAND study from 2015 found that more than 4 million uninsured people had bought plans on the exchanges, and another 6 million previously uninsured people were covered by the ACA's Medicaid expansion. It's unclear what would happen to Obamacare's beneficiaries if the law vanished overnight, especially those who have "preexisting conditions" that many insurers refused to cover before the ACA forced them to.

Luckily, for Farley, she's able to stay on insurance through COBRA for about $500 month thanks to the Clinton gig.She can't quite work up the nerve to google how much it will cost after that runs out of this fall, but she assumes that if it comes down to it, she'll probably just go without.

Unlike Farley, Danika Peterson's daughter wasn't born with a life-threatening illness, though she developed brain cancer at the age of one. She's on her father's plan, which means the family pays about a $2,000 deductible, and everything after that is covered. Within the first six months of the diagnosis, Peterson says that a tumor biopsy, stays in the ICU, visits to cancer specialists, and MRIs, all racked up to $140,000. Right now, her drug is $3,000 a month, which is less than some of the others she's been on, but is by no means cheap.

Peterson's been scanning the news and looking for hints of what might happen. She remembers reading that the Republicans might create a plan that keeps those with preexisting conditions covered as long as they don't allow their insurance to lapse. (An Obamacare alternative favored by Tom Price, Trump's pick to lead the Health and Human Services Department, goes this route.)

"Which is great as a preexisting condition option," she says. "But if they go more extreme than that, maybe we'd still be able to get health insurance, but it would be $150,000 a year. We definitely don't make that in six months."

Peterson is also worried about what would happen if her husband lost his job as a software tester, or if she lost hers as the news director of a public access station in Minnesota. Even more concerning is what might come to replace Obamacare. If there's no provision that allows people to stay on their parents' insurance from the ages of 18 to 26, Peterson worries about the years her daughter could spend uninsured. And if the ban on denying people coverage for preexisting coverage is lifted, it's unclear when she might ever get insured again. The tumor has been in flux since the diagnosis and is slowly eating away at Peterson's daughter's optic nerve, which is making her go blind.

"It's not going away, but it's not getting a whole lot bigger," she says. "Stable is not really a medical condition."

Will Stratton has had a more complicated health insurance odyssey than most young people. He was lucky enough to have insurance when he was diagnosed with stage three testicular cancer at the age of 26. But the acclaimed musician, who was working at a Brooklyn law firm at the time, says that the coverage he had didn't give him the best possible chance of survival. His co-workers were young, and none of them had ever been really sick. So it wasn't that he was being screwed over by his employer—it was more like he reached the limits of what they could afford and thought was appropriate.

The insurance would only let him see a select few doctors in Brooklyn, though the best specialist was near his parents in Seattle. Thanks to the ACA, he was able to transfer to his dad's insurance, quit his job, move home, and be treated by the best person possible. He was also able to petition the insurance company to keep him onboard for more chemotherapy after he turned 27. He was in the clear after four rounds.

Today, Stratton doesn't have insurance. After his Social Security disability ran out, there was only one plan in the New York state exchange that would allow him to enroll. It went out of business. He's back to work upstate and waiting for his employer's plan to kick in around June. Until then, he's applying for charity cases to get his follow-up appointments taken care of.

"I've had experiences with the exchange that have kind of colored by opinion of the Affordable Care Act—I think like everybody who's had to deal with a federal exchange or a state exchange," he says. "But in terms of my survival, I think it probably saved my life."

Liz, a 41-year-old from the DC area who did not want me to use her full name, says that if the ban is lifted she'll probably never have insurance again. Her mom died at the age of 46 due to complications from multiple sclerosis after surviving cervical cancer. The "genetic possibility of an auto-immune disorder" was enough to keep insurance companies from taking Liz on prior to 2010.

What's more, she has no idea where two two stepsons would be without the Affordable Care Act. Her eldest stepson is bipolar and first had a psychotic break at 17; he would have been uninsured the moment he turned 18 and unable to get medicines that manage his mental health. Liz's younger stepson is an Army veteran with a traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder. Because he's still 25, Liz is using her insurance to get him surgery to repair a botched operation that removed his right near and left a knot where it used to be.

Liz had good healthcare prior to the Affordable Care Act and still managed to benefit immensely from it. Her experiences with the US healthcare system have left her pretty pissed off.

"Repeal with absolutely zero plan for replacement or discussion about how it might be improved is, I believe, one of the most cowardly, inhuman, disgusting actions politicians could have taken," she says. "It makes no sense whatever to me that anyone should be denied healthcare if they need it in this country, nor that anyone ought to be bankrupted for trying not to die."

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On Monday, while you were watching Meryl Streep's viral Globes speech or doing whatever else to fill the void, planet Earth came dangerously close to being hit by a small asteroid. Asteroid 2017 AG13—as it has since been dubbed—is roughly the size of a multi-storey apartment building, and just scraped by without making contact with the planet we're living on. And, somewhat disturbingly, scientists only realised it was coming at the very last minute.

Travelling at a relative velocity of more than 57,600 kilometres per hour, the asteroid missed Earth by about 160,000 kilometres. Which may sound like a lot, but it's actually a bit too close for comfort. It's two times closer than the distance between the Earth and the moon.

AG13 was spotted over the weekend by astronomers at the Slooh Observatory, who organised a last minute live broadcast of the fly-by. So there was only a two-day buffer between us knowing about the asteroid, and the asteroid passing us by. For reference, NASA scientists had an 18-day asteroid warning in the movie Armageddon.

While the space rock wasn't large enough to destroy the planet, or require the services of Bruce Willis, it would likely have caused significant damage to whatever populated area it hit. In 2013, the Russian town of Chelyabinsk was hit by a fireball, blowing out windows and causing thousands of minor injuries.

So why wasn't AG13 spotted? Well, the asteroid was about half the size of those that are usually detected by NASA's infrared telescope Near Earth Object Camera (NEOCam), which is designed to search the skies for potentially devastating asteroid threats. The NEOCam program is currently operating only with limited funding, with NASA choosing to instead prioritise asteroid exploration missions on Jupiter.

If the imminent threat of space rock destruction worries you, check out the official White House strategy on detecting and deflecting asteroids here. As the document outlines, "in an ideal situation, an Earth-bound NEO can be deflected or disrupted well before it reaches Earth" but "scenarios may occur in which a NEO impact cannot be prevented because there is not enough time between detection and impact to deflect or disrupt it."

Unfortunately, asteroid detection funding is so low that asteroids the size of AG13 will continue to go undetected by NASA. Which sucks, because they can potentially cause major harm to cities. As for the Armageddon-sized NEOs, well—we'll probably see them coming, but the question of when will determine how well we can respond.

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The Dungeons and Dragons series has been around for a long, long time. The pen and paper roleplaying franchise is as old, if not older, than the medium of video games. In a way, D&D has always felt like a precursor to gaming. They both share in the act of pretending, it's just that D&D requires a lot more note-taking and imagination.

But where D&D influenced gaming, gaming can influence D&D right back.

To be more specific, we need to look beyond classic table-top RPGs like D&D, into more recent releases. Despite both its pedigree and popularity, Dungeons & Dragons isn't the only type of table-top RPG you can play.

For example, my very first campaign creation experience started with a fairly new table-top RPG called Dread. Created by independent RPG publisher Epidiah Ravacho, Dread is a ruleset designed to do one thing: build atmosphere.

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Well, it's happening. In ten short days, President Obama will collect his things and leave the White House, handing the keys to the country over to Donald Trump.

But before he heads out, the outgoing president has a few final words for his weary, divided nation. On Tuesday, Obama will give his final speech to roughly 14,000 people at Chicago's McCormick Place, where he's not only expected to defend Obamacare and the recovering economy, but encourage future leaders, according to his aides.

The farewell speech will be broadcast live on a handful of networks as well as livestreamed from the White House website at 9 PM EST.

Until then, watch a fresh-faced Barry O deliver the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, back when he was just an obscure senator from Illinois. The speech is largely considered Obama's introduction to the nation, where he debuted his public-speaking chops, long before anyone considered he'd run for president. Grab some tissues, remember what it was like to have hope, and watch Young Obama do his thing.

These days a patch of grass and a chain link fence is all you can really hope for in a home.

Canada's biggest cities—but especially Toronto and Vancouver—have been getting a lot of attention for their soaring real estate rates. Houses in Toronto now average $730,000, ranking it the most expensive city to live followed closely by Vancouver.

There always lurks a seedy underbelly to any desirable destination. Not everyone can afford a one bedroom $2,500 a month condo overlooking the waterfront. Stats Canada noted that in 2014 about 4.9 million people (1 out of 7) were living below the poverty line.

For those of us on a budget, what kind of rentals are available in these high-priced cities? Unless you're willing to move to Montreal, the options are pretty sad:

$920 / Bachelor / Kensington Market / Toronto

Located in the desirable Kensington Market area, this dimly-lit first entry screams meth lab and boasts a sink that's nearly merged with the stove and not one, but two photos of the built-in bathroom shelf. There may not be pictures of the rest of the unit, but rest assured that it's within "crawling distance" to the nearest "veg and fruit store."

Rank: 1 bedbug out of 5.

$1,850 / One Floor / The Annex / Toronto

Toronto rentals are notorious for price gouging. It's overpriced for what it is: a converted attic. Admittedly the place is in one of the best areas in the city and while it is bright, there's no way that it's 1,000 sq ft unless half of it is on balcony. For just under $2,000, you get the luxury of sleeping in your kitchen and marinating overnight, every night, in the musk of the rotting vegetable juices lurking on the bottom of your fridge.

Rank: 3 sushi restaurants out of 5.

$1,750 / 2 Bedroom / Queen West / Toronto

A general rule when apartment hunting is that if a listing doesn't have photos of the unit, it's probably because it's so small it could serve as a makeshift prison for your soul. Thankfully this expensive as shit listing is honest: this is it. A concrete cell so cramped you'll feel like you're in solitary confinement. But at least you don't have to leave your room to do laundry.

Rank: 2.3 conjugal visits out of 5.

$1,300 / 2 Bedroom / Burnaby / Vancouver

Vancouver listings seem marginally less gross but still pretty overpriced. This unit is 600 sq ft and in aparment terms that would make the "bedrooms" about the size of a closet (if you're lucky). This means that you and your housemate will be having a lot of unwanted interaction. Maybe they're the type that has a lot of random hookups and you've had to give an awkward up-nod to their latest on one too many occasions while you're just trying to enjoy your Fruit Loops before heading off to class.

Rank: 2 moon emojis out of 5.

$1,350 / 1 Bedroom / Main Street / Vancouver

Sometimes it seems like apartments were made for the lonely. This space is made even sadder by the restrictions set out by a landlord that seems bent on keeping you prisoner. This one specifies that it's, "For a quiet responsible person," and doesn't want guests around. For that price why couldn't you have a friend or two or seven over? Futons are meant for threesomes. And a single bed? That's perfect cuffing season cuddles, or an ideal excuse to send your booty call home early on hot nights. And the aggressive "NON-SMOKER, NO PETS, NO DRUGS" should be a red flag for anyone looking to reasonably enjoy their new cell, I mean home.

Rank: 1.8 coke-fuelled orgies out of 5.

Meanwhile in Montreal … the listings actually boast livable space with reasonable rates in prime neighbourhoods where the plaster isn't falling from the ceiling and not every room looks like a mortuary.

$1,800 / 4 Bedroom / Milton Park / Montreal

Note that this is the first time we've seen a full-size kitchen that doesn't make you feel like you're trapped in an oversized slow cooker. Bless Montreal. Truly this is a space where, with the right people, you can really start to spread your wings, feel alive, and not have to sleep with your head beside your toilet. For just $450 a person you can live in one of the nicest areas with corner stores that sell booze, a 24 hr poutine place, and a strip club all within a one block radius. Are you sure you even deserve that?

Rank: 4 boobie tassles out of 5.

$1,190 / 2 Bedroom / McGill Ghetto / Montreal

Are you someone who likes their space and perhaps even flushes the toilet after use? This last entry is bright, beautiful, above ground and hopefully doesn't contain too much asbestos. Again located in arguably the best area for a great price, Montreal keeps winning on the livability front amongst Canada's biggest cities. Those mobsters must be doing something right.

Rank: 5 probably too good to be true's out of 5.

So there you have it, for the extra $1,000 you're paying a month for a shit box in Toronto, you could get a train ticket to Montreal for you and three friends, hit up Osheaga and just never leave.

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"I have never wanted to do this documentary in my life," Mariah says during the first episode of the eight-part E! series, Mariah's World. She's aboard a yacht—a gift from her (soon-to-be-former) fiancé, James Packer, who has his own yacht parked nearby. He's a night person and she's a day person, she explains, so naturally they can't be on the same yacht. "There's so little privacy in entertainment anyway," she continues. "But I think if I don't document this now, I don't know when I'm gonna do it again and I think it's gonna be something I'm gonna treasure ultimately."

Just a few months earlier, elaborating on the series, she told the New York Times: "I refuse to call it a reality show...I thought it would be a good opportunity to kind of, like, show my personality and who I am, even though I feel like my real fans have an idea of who I am."

Mariah Carey is right; we already know who she is. She's the singer with the impressive range who married the man who discovered her only to eventually break free from his control and pen 1997's Butterfly. She's the fan favorite who had a nervous breakdown live on MTV's Total Request Live in 2001. She's the diva who coined "I don't know her" when asked about rival Jennifer Lopez (only to be asked again, years later, and responding, "I still don't know her"). She may not know Lopez, but we know her. The elusive chanteuse is not quite as elusive as she may think.

We also don't need a reality show to remind us that. Carey calls Mariah's World a documentary again and again; it is not. Not only would the editing and story structure disagree, but so would the cast of characters who the show's producers have chosen to highlight. One standout is the singer's comically difficult manager, Stella Bulochnikov—who bumps heads with Creative Director/choreographer Anthony Burrell (in turn, Burrell, of course, bumps heads with her backup singer, MaryAnn Tatum). Furthering the notion that this is more reality show than docu-series, Mariah's World throws in a strange made-for-TV B-plot where Stella hires a tour assistant who has a mini breakdown while setting up Mariah's Apple TV. (Mariah will later prank call this poor assistant, adding to the "light funness" of the Mariah persona.)

Manager Bulochnikov even plays more like a reality TV star—specifically, like a Real Housewife of New Jersey—than a manager. This is unsurprising, considering she took over seemingly by force in 2015 when Mariah dramatically canned her publicist Cindi Berger and went with "a fresh approach." In a Page Six article titled "Why Mariah Carey's manager is more like a 'dictator'" Bulochnikov was described as such:

"Stella is the furthest thing from a manager. She's a TV producer. She's practically moved in with Mariah and now she has so much stuff on her that she can get her to do anything. She's pulling the strings, and Mariah does whatever she says."

One of the strings she pulled was putting together Mariah's World. This is perhaps why it felt a little strange to longtime Mariah fans: It was something the singer would never do—something she didn't need to do.

But if she's going to do it, it's clear she'll do it her way. Mariah's World includes a reality show staple, but with her own Mariah twist: a perfectly-lighted confessional. Mariah is perhaps the first reality star to provide commentary exclusively while draped horizontally across a chaise lounge.

Following common reality show tropes, Mariah's World also includes a love interest—not from the advertised source, billionaire James Packer, but from a young background dancer, Bryan Tanaka. Tanaka's confessionals (reportedly recorded long after the fact) reveal that he's majorly crushing on his pop star boss. How cute! She flirts with him, harmlessly at first, but we all know that Mariah and Packer are not meant to be. Soon, she'll be very Tanaka—very publicly. It's weird watching what we're supposed to assume is the blossoming of their relationship, because it's almost certainly very specifically arranged, produced, and scripted television.

But while Mariah's World is certainly not a documentary, it still manages to be a frank and accurate look at Mariah Carey. Mariah has always given the illusion of "realness"—her frequent spouting of "I don't know her," her connection to her fans (the lambs, of course), her rendition of "4real4real" off 2008's E=MC². Where Beyoncé is inaccessible, Mariah is available and willing to comment. She manages to project the image of a diva while somehow remaining endlessly relatable. Perhaps it's because she helped pioneer and encourage a modern fandom identity—speaking directly to her lambs in a language seemingly made just for the both of them. Her penthouse apartment was MTV's Cribs most memorable: she let us into her home—her multi-million dollar home, sure, but when she hopped on an elliptical in stilettos, there was no one we felt we knew better than Mariah.

In that way, the show manages to straddle Mariah's own self-identity and that which makes her endlessly entertaining, both on and off stage. She insists that she's authentic, straightforward, and without filter while maintaining a well-documented fear of fluorescent lighting (she won't be photographed in it without sunglasses, even going over choreography in shades). She remains, as always, the ultimate elusive chanteuse—even while convincing us that we know her.

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Backpage.com removed its controversial "adult section" after a searing report from the Senate accused the classified website of "knowingly" facilitating underage sex trafficking.

The 53-page Senate report, published Monday by an investigative subcommittee of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, contains three principal findings. First, Backpage concealed evidence of sex trafficking by "systematically editing its 'adult' ads. Second, executives knew about it. And third, despite the website's sale to an undisclosed foreign company in 2014, the true beneficiaries remain the same people who founded it.

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Ed Whitlock is a once-in-a-generation athlete. He won't get the same coverage as a LeBron James, but he's been competitively running marathons at a high level for over 60 years. What exactly is the secret to shattering records for every age bracket out there? According to Ed, it's running laps through a cemetery.

Watch our interview with Ed on VICE Sports

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According to a study coordinated by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism in 2015, nearly 10 percent of Americans had smoked marijuana at least once in the past year. That accounts for 30-plus million people, which is slightly more than the total population of Texas. But it's only recently that the government has finally started to catch up with average citizens' attitudes toward the drug, which in the last half century has gone from the source of tremendous moral panic to something much less severe, something approaching a virtual non-issue.

Public policy is beginning to reflect this shift. Four states (California, Nevada, Massachusetts, and Maine) passed legislation decriminalizing weed for recreational use this past election, adding to an already healthy list where it can be enjoyed—for the most part—without fear of reprisal from law enforcement. Beyond US borders, the Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau vowed to legalize cannabis across the country as soon as he took office. It's strange to think that in a moment where hard-line conservatism is sweeping much of the Western world, weed is more or less a bipartisan cause. And as attitudes about weed change, and it becomes available legally in more places, an opportunity to make money has been enjoying increased attention for a few years now: buying stock in companies hoping to capitalize in the quickly growing industry.

"You could almost watch a correlation between how much volume our stocks moved and how well Trudeau was doing in the polls prior to the election," says Jordan Sinclair, director of communications at Tweed, an Ontario-based cannabis business owned by the overarching company Canopy Growth. "People would see his chances improving and think, Oh, how can I capitalize on this?"

Canopy Growth, which describes itself as "a world leading diversified cannabis company," is one of many trade-able enterprises that are taking advantage of the newly fertile corporate ground for marijuana in North America. Hopeful investors are dumping money into these weed companies the same way you might take a flyer on a bright-eyed tech company. And for good reason: With pharmaceutical conglomerates producing cannabis-related medical products, and speculative companies getting their feet wet in the burgeoning possibilities of decriminalized recreational weed, CNBC reports legal marijuana sales will eclipse $20 billion by 2020.

You may be wondering how these businesses can position themselves in the marijuana sector despite national prohibition. Weed is still a Schedule I drug, and there's no guarantee enforcement of the drug will continue to be de-emphasized by the federal government—effectively drying up locally legal marijuana sectors. Still, in early 2015, the US Securities and Exchanges Commission (SEC)allowed the registration of shares of storefronts whose business model included the cultivation and sale of marijuana, and there are many other companies tapping into the industry without directly touching the plant.

The valuation of Miami-based Novus Acquisition and Development, for instance, jumped a ridiculous 3,100 percent in 2014, and it focuses mostly on providing membership services for alternative medicine patients. The Scotts Miracle-Gro Company is pouring millions of dollars into hydroponics, apparently convinced the weed sector will invigorate the sale and production of its grow lights across the country. There's even a Denver-based social platform for marijuana called MassRoots, which applied for NASDAQ listing last year. Which begs another question: Are weed stocks something savvy investors should be considering adding to their portfolios, or is it foolish to put your money in something that could go belly up with a new, possibly less weed-friendly administration?

"There are definitely some concerns in regard to this due to previous commentary from Jeff Sessions, but I look at that as noise," says Jason Spatafora, one of the owners of marijuanastocks.com, and the self-proclaimed "Wolf of Weed Street." "This industry is the fastest-growing emerging industry in the world and employs hundreds of thousands of people, churning billions of dollars in revenue. The election had both red states and blue states adopt cannabis legislation, and it stands to reason that it signaled a paradigm shift for cannabis."

One of the epicenters for amateur marijuana investors is r/weedstocks, a subreddit for enterprising hopefuls to discuss, advise, double-down, and commiserate. It's a fast-paced ticker-tape for a very specific corner of stock exchange. Every day, the faithful try to keep up with a volatile industry. Last November, Canopy Growth's value dropped 15 percent on a Tuesday, only to rebound 20 percent the following Wednesday. The subreddit is there every step of the way, a support group of sorts for those navigating these new and sometimes very choppy waters.

"Raiden" is a regular on r/weedstocks, and started investing in marijuana in 2013. Over the past four years, he's watched all the triumphs and anxieties you'd expect from a developing sector, and maintains that buying weed stocks isn't nearly as clandestine as you might expect.

"You can trade weed stocks through most platforms," he says. "Your typical new entrant is going to use an online trading service like Scottrade, Etrade, Schwabb, TD Ameritrade, etc. It is just the same as buying or selling any other stock."

The users on r/weedstocks rely on each other, because there's no definitive mainstream literature on marijuana stocks. The weed industry is still nascent, and while a small handful of cannabis-related companies like GW Pharmaceuticals and Cara Therapeutics are traded on the NASDAQ, most are unlisted. "You're normally trading in penny stocks here, and inherently taking on a higher risk because of it," says Raiden.

Eventually the real players will level out.

Companies that trade smaller, over-the-counter stocks aren't required to show the same transparency as the conglomerates on the New York Stock Exchange. That doesn't mean you can't make money off them, but it does open the door for more uncertainty, and more mischief.

In 2014, the US Securities and Exchange Commission suspended five weed-related tickers for fraud, surmising that "fraudsters often exploit the latest innovation, technology, product, or growth industry—in this case, marijuana—to lure investors with the promise of high returns. Also, for marijuana-related companies that are not required to report with the SEC, investors may have limited information about the company's management, products, services, and finances. When publicly available information is scarce, fraudsters can more easily spread false information about a company, making profits for themselves while creating losses for unsuspecting investors."

Bombshells like those suspensions can cause sudden ups and downs in the weed market. "There are probably hundreds of tickers out there touting a connection to cannabis," Raiden says. "People saw the wave, put out some PR fluff that they knew a guy who knew a guy who owned a grow store and operation. It can be very shady if you don't know how to perform your due diligence on a company or at least properly look over their charts, stability, share count, etc." He adds: "A few stocks were made examples of, and for good reason."

Sinclair concedes he's noticed some troubling incidents of fraud in the past, but maintains that any instability in the market is predictable given the newness of the trade. Eventually, the real players will level out.

Ultimately, Raiden believes if you're savvy and do your research, weed can be a viable investment. For now, he recommends people stick to stocks that don't deal directly with marijuana production, instead investing in weed-adjacent equipment manufacturers or consulting firms. Those businesses should still be viable even if Mike Pence or Jeff Sessions go to war with pot. "We believe states' rights will be honored, but having the federal level accept legal weed income is a whole new ball game. We don't know what our political climate will cause, but there are some favorable signs in the new president," he says.

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The Senate confirmation hearings for Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, President-elect Donald Trump's nominee for attorney general, were forecast to be brutal, and in many ways the first four hours of questioning Sessions faced on Tuesday lived up to the expectations.

Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, of which Sessions is a member, grilled their colleague about his views on abortion, immigration, criminal justice reform, LGBT issues, his questionable record on civil rights, and several other tough topics.

Three decades ago, the civil rights issue derailed Sessions' nomination for a federal judgeship, with the same Senate Judiciary Committee ultimately rejecting him for the job. Today, Sessions proved that much has changed since then.

"I never declared that the NAACP was 'un-American' or that a civil rights attorney was a 'disgrace to his race,'" Sessions said in his opening statement, forcefully denying the allegations he faced in 1986.

The staunchly conservative Republican proceeded to repeatedly dodge and deflect difficult questions about his beliefs, deftly avoiding any potentially damaging moments. When pressed about sensitive subjects, Sessions frequently said it would be up to Congress to decide the laws he would enforce as Attorney General.

Read more on VICE News

A version of this article originally appeared on the Trace.

On November 7, 2016, Esteban Santiago walked into the FBI field office in downtown Anchorage, Alaska, holding his newborn child. The 26-year-old Army National Guard veteran told the agents who greeted him that his mind was being controlled by the CIA.

Special Agent in Charge Marlin Ritzman said Santiago was "agitated, incoherent, and [making] disjointed statements." Ritzman added that Santiago said that "he did not wish to harm anyone," but his behavior prompted agents to contact local police.

Chief Chris Tolley of the Anchorage police has described the incident as a "mental health crisis."

Santiago had a pistol magazine on him and the unloaded weapon in his car. Earlier in the year, he had attempted to strangle his girlfriend in an episode that landed him in a deferred prosecution program, authorities said.

Anchorage police seized the firearm and took Santiago to a mental health facility.

Despite the erratic behavior he had displayed, Santiago would soon be reunited with his gun. One day and one month later, he went to police headquarters to collect his firearm.

On January 6, Santiago checked the same 9mm handgun on a flight from Anchorage to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. After landing, he allegedly retrieved the weapon from his baggage, loaded it in an airport bathroom, returned to the baggage claim area, and opened fire. Apparently aiming for the heads of his victims, he shot 11 people, killing five.

Following the shooting, Broward County sheriff Scott Israel, whose officers responded to the scene of the attack, was among many to question the efficacy of American laws regarding psychiatric illness and guns.

"People who are suffering from mental illness should not be allowed, in my opinion, to purchase or have firearms at any time," he told a Miami news station. "Enough is enough."

But unless facts emerge suggesting otherwise, there was nothing in the existing statutes to prevent Santiago from getting his gun back. Under federal policy, one of the few ways for a person to be judged psychologically incompetent to possess a firearm kicks in only when a court orders that person hospitalized for psychiatric care against his or her will.

"As far as I know, this is not somebody that would have been prohibited based on the information that [authorities in Alaska] have," Karen Loeffler, the US attorney for the District of Alaska, said at a news conference.

"Gun control in our country isn't really gun control. It's people control," Jeffrey Swanson, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University School of Medicine, told the Trace. "And how we do that is complicated."

Here is a primer on how people are determined too mentally unfit to own a gun, how such determinations are enforced, and the flaws that experts see in the current system.

How does the government decide who is too mentally ill to have a gun?

The standard in place was established by the 1968 Gun Control Act, which set a high bar. One way to be disqualified from possessing a gun is to have been involuntarily committed to mental health treatment. The mental health ban also applies to prospective firearms owners "adjudicated as a mental defective"—an antiquated term to describe individuals found unfit to stand trial, incompetent to take care of their own affairs, or a danger to themselves or others.

But the law as applied isn't at all clear-cut. States have enacted a mix of policies that seek to define what qualifies as mental health treatment, and the length of time that a firearm ban must stay in place before a person may appeal to have it reversed.

This is where the fine print comes in?

Exactly.

In a handful of states, including Wisconsin, persons committed by law enforcement authorities to an emergency detention—commonly the longest allowed without a ruling by a judge—have their guns temporarily taken away. In slightly less than half of the country, the definition of involuntary commitment is expanded to include mandated outpatient programs, a step down from hospitalization. Other states require that individuals be hospitalized for a minimum length of time before their gun rights can be stripped. In Washington, for example, a person has to be involuntarily committed for more than two weeks to be prohibited from possessing a gun.

States also have myriad and differing rules for how individuals subject to firearms bans can petition to restore their gun rights.

What about people who voluntarily commit themselves for psychiatric treatment?

In most states, a person who voluntarily enters inpatient treatment is not barred from purchasing a gun, although there are a few exceptions. For example, Connecticut prohibits people who check themselves in for mental health care from possessing or purchasing firearms for six months after release. Illinois requires former voluntary psychiatric patients to be certified as no longer a threat.

How do gun sellers know if someone has a history of mental illness?

Licensed gun dealers are required to query the FBI's federal background check system—the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, or NICS—to see if a would-be customer is banned from purchasing a firearm. If a buyer's name is listed among those with disqualifying mental health records, the dealer is supposed to refuse the sale.

In all but 19 states, private sales do not necessitate a background check, and therefore do not involve a mental health screening.

Check out our 2012 documentary about gun culture in Florida.

So the FBI keeps the names of everyone barred from buying a gun under federal law?

No—the system only contains the records forwarded to it by officials farther down the chain. Federal law doesn't require state healthcare officials to submit records to NICS. And while 43 states have their own laws for forwarding psychiatric records to federal background check databases, the comprehensiveness of those requirements varies widely.

A glaring consequence of those records gaps can be found in the case of the Virginia Tech gunman, Seung-Hui Cho, who should have been barred from purchasing the gun he used in his 2007 rampage. A Virginia court had declared Cho a danger to himself two years before the massacre, and mandated that he seek psychiatric treatment. But his mental health records were never reported to NICS, and Cho was able to buy the guns he used to kill 32 people and wound 17. An investigative panel ordered by then-governor Tim Kaine in the wake of the shooting found that "the system failed for lack of resources, incorrect interpretation of privacy laws, and passivity.

The Virginia Tech killings spurred Congress to pass the NICS Improvement Act of 2008, which gave healthcare providers financial incentives to report patient mental health records to NICS (before the bill, only 22 states were voluntarily doing so). But funding was also contingent on states creating "relief from disability" programs, which allow people to petition to have their gun rights restored. As of December 2015, states had submitted nearly 4 million mental health records to the background check system.

But compliance is inconsistent. While Pennsylvania has submitted 756,952 records to NICS, four states have submitted fewer than 100, which means that even if Santiago's history had met the criteria for involuntary commitment, his record might not have been in the database, anyway.

Does the existing system at least flag the people most likely to carry out violence?

Experts have their doubts.

Anger-management issues and impulsive-aggressive behavior are highly correlated with gun violence, as are common mental health issues such as PTSD and alcoholism, according to Swanson, the Duke professor. People with such conditions are rarely hospitalized, and thus don't fall under the federal definition of dangerousness under the 1968 law.

Swanson authored an analysis estimating that about one in every ten American adults who has a problem with anger and impulsive-aggressive behavior also has access to firearms. The study suggests that firearm violence might be better prevented if policies restricted gun access for Americans demonstrating a pattern of uncontrolled angry behavior.

Only a few states—including Connecticut, Indiana, California, and Washington—have those kinds of measures in place. The California version, dubbed a "gun violence restraining order" and implemented in 2016, enables friends and family members to have a loved one's gun seized for a defined period of time if they believe he or she poses a threat to themselves or others, even if he or she doesn't meet the criteria for involuntary commitment.

Swanson argues that the federal government's definition of mental illness is"too broad and also too narrow." Many people fall under the government's definition of mentally ill who are very unlikely to ever be violent—and in fact are much more likely to be the victims of violence themselves, research shows.

On the other hand, the definition misses many whose conditions place them at elevated risk of lashing out, perhaps lethally, if they have access to firearms.

Along with the Fort Lauderdale gunman, a number of recent mass shooters clearly suffered from mental illnesses but had never been involuntarily committed, including the perpetrators of the attack that wounded former congresswoman Gabby Giffords, the Aurora movie theater shooting, and the Washington Navy Yard and Santa Barbara rampages.

A version of this article was originally published by the Trace, a nonprofit news organization covering guns in America. Sign up for the newsletter, or follow the Trace on Facebook or Twitter.

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The Streakz Coiffure hair salon in Laval, the sprawling island suburb north of Montreal, did not burn down alone early Monday morning. Caught up in the blaze that destroyed it were a convenience store, a bakery and an ice-cream shop. According to one TV report, a gas canister was tossed into the salon, and nearby propane tanks added to the fire's ferocity.

The salon was the second of two Streakz Coiffures to burn in the span of a week. The first, also in Laval, was hit just a few days earlier, at around 2AM on Thursday, Jan. 5. Police at the time said firefighters could smell accelerant at the scene.

Both were owned by Caterina Miceli, the wife of Carmelo (Mini-Me) Cannistraro, a 46-year-old who led a bookmaking ring with ties to the once-dominant, now-embattled Rizzuto crime family. He was arrested in 2006 as part of the Project Colisée investigation and pleaded guilty in 2011.

The salons are just the latest in a string of suspected arsons targeting Rizzuto-related businesses. According to a report in La Presse in December, there have been over 13 arsons and attempted arsons linked to the Montreal Mafia, 12 of them since September. Eleven of them have been against suspected Rizzuto businesses.

The attacks aren't just limited to the burning of a few stores. Three high-ranking Rizzuto family members were murdered last year: Lorenzo Giordano, 52, in March, Rocco Sollecito, 67, in May and Vincenzo Spagnolo, 65, in October.

Pallbearers carry the coffin of reputed mafia boss Vito Rizzuto from a church in Montreal, Monday, Dec. 30, 2013. Photo via THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham Hughes

To outsiders, this suggests that the Rizzuto crime family, which ruled Montreal's vibrant crime scene relatively smoothly for almost 40 years, is besieged by enemies who have left it reeling on the defensive since the death of its patriarch, Vito Rizzuto, just over three years ago. But who, exactly, is starting the fires, planting the bombs and murdering the members of the dwindling group of Rizzuto loyalists?

There are several theories. Some have speculated that Toronto's Mafiosi might be working to weaken the Montreal family; others think that the Hells Angels might be involved. Or that the Montreal Mafia is riven by internal differences, broadly along lines related to geography. This last theory proposes that a so-called Sicilian faction of Rizzuto loyalists is coming under attack from a Calabrian faction, made up of those whose loyalties have always lied with the Cotroni crime family that ran the city until it was bloodily supplanted by Nicolo "Nick" Rizzuto, Vito's father, in the late 1970s/early 1980s. (Nick was subsequently murdered in 2010.)

READ MORE: Latest Montreal Mob Hit May Have Buried the Rizzuto Family for Good 

To Antonio Nicaso, the Toronto-based author and university professor who specializes in organized crime, it is clear that the conflict gripping the Montreal mob is coming from within. But he doesn't think it's based so clearly along a Sicily-versus-Calabria rivalry.

"It's like having many roosters in a henhouse," he told VICE Tuesday. After Rizzuto's death from lung cancer in December 2013, following a lengthy stay in a US prison for his role in a 1981 triple murder in Brooklyn, the wheels came off the tightly-controlled Rizzuto family.

"There is a clash between the old guard and what we can call the renegades," says Nicaso. The renegades, he says, "don't like the idea of replacing Rizzuto with another person and re-establishing the type of Mafia monarchy that controlled Montreal for over 30 years."

They want a more "democratic structure," he says, one in which leadership is not concentrated in the hands of a small group of individuals or a single boss.

Nicaso believes it is possible that the so-called renegade faction is being funded or otherwise supported by an Ontario-based alliance between the Quebec Hells Angels and the Ontario branch of the 'Ndrangheta, the criminal organization based in Calabria. There's no evidence to support the claim, but he believes it makes sense from a strategic point of view.

READ MORE: How the Hells Angels Conquered Canada

"They like the idea of replacing the Mafia monarchy with a confederation of clans," he says. "Because they won't have to deal with a strong, big organization like before. It's better to be in a criminal landscape in which they are peers, rather than have someone at the top who is controlling and giving direction to everyone."

Family members Leonardo Rizzuto (right) his sister Bettina and mother Giovanni Cammalleri (centre) leave the funeral of reputed mafia boss Vito Rizzuto in Montreal, Monday, Dec. 30, 2013. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham Hughes

But he says that while it is temptingly easy to view the conflict tearing the Montreal mob apart geographically, with sides choosing their loyalties to either Calabria or Sicily, the reality is much more complex. He points out that, for instance, one of the highest-ranking members of the Rizzuto family, until his break with it, was Raynald Desjardins, a French-Canadian.

Yes, he says, there are Calabrians who are trying to destroy the Rizzutos. But, he adds, "The people who are challenging the old guard are not all Calabrians." The Rizzutos made a lot of enemies over the decades, but they also created a very wealthy organization in the meantime. With the clan leaderless and weak, the timing to strike a lethal blow and divvy up the spoils couldn't be better. He believes an alliance of convenience made up of various groups, each with their own motivations, has formed with the intention of destroying the Rizzutos' hold on criminal activity in the city.

Nevertheless, he says, violence is and always has been bad for business, and the sooner it ends, the better for everybody involved. But when the shootings and the bombings and the arsons stop, it may very well mean that the centralized power of the Rizzuto crime family has been broken forever.

Follow Patrick on Twitter.

On Tuesday, Donald Trump called a meeting with environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to allegedly discuss placing him on a new commission regarding vaccine policies, a position that Kennedy says he accepted, the Washington Post reports.

"President-elect Trump has some doubts about the current vaccine policies, and he has questions about it," Kennedy told reporters in the Trump Tower lobby. "His opinion doesn't matter, but the science does matter, and we ought to be reading the science, and we ought to be debating the science. And that everybody ought to be able to be assured that the vaccines that we have—he's very pro-vaccine, as am I—but they're as safe as they possibly can be."

The president-elect shared his views on vaccines during the campaign, most notably during one Republican presidential debate, where he tossed out the widely discredited theory that vaccines are linked to autism.

"We had so many instances, people that work for me, just the other day, two years old, a beautiful child, went to have the vaccine and came back, and a week later got a tremendous fever, got very, very sick, now is autistic," Trump said during the debate in 2015.

Like Trump, Kennedy has also been an outspoken skeptic of vaccines, particularly of the component thimerosal, which he has said can cause autism—something the CDC says there is no evidence of and a fringe theory medical professionals see as a threat to public health. According to CBS News, Kennedy even wrote a book on and promoted a film about this claim called Trace Amounts.

"They get the shot, that night they have a fever of a 103, they go to sleep, and three months later, their brain is gone," Kennedy said during a 2015 promotional appearance for the film in Sacramento. "This is a holocaust, what this is doing to our country."

No one from Trump's transition team has commented on the possible appointment, and it's not 100 percent clear what a "vaccination safety and scientific integrity" commission would or could do, but Kennedy has worked in the past to lobby Congress to roll back child vaccination laws, CNN reports. According to the World Health Organization, vaccines prevent 6 million deaths worldwide each year, so there's that.

Dylann Roof, the 22-year-old white supremacist who murdered nine parishioners of a South Carolina church in June 2015, was sentenced to death on Tuesday, the New York Times reports.

He reportedly showed no emotion as the judge read out the decision, which was reached by nine white and three black jurors and capped off a saga of a high school dropout who self-radicalized by reading racist material on the internet.

Almost 18 months ago, Roof walked into the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and opened fire on a Bible study group with a semi-automatic handgun. Last month, he was found guilty of 33 counts—18 of which carried the possibility of execution. Hate crimes are tried at a federal level, and cases tried by the US government are divided into guilt and sentencing phases. During the trial to determine what punishment Roof would receive, the convicted killer called no witnesses and represented himself out of concern that lawyers would attempt to suggest he was mentally unwell.

Roof received money to purchase a gun from his uncle for his 21st birthday. At the time, he was unemployed and had a history of erratic behavior, including getting busted with Suboxone after acting bizarrely at a Bath and Body Works. A local retailer in West Columbia called Shooter's Choice took advantage of a loophole in the federal system that should have prevented Roof from buying a gun because he had been busted with an illegal substance.

In the weeks leading up to the shooting, he crashed in a trailer park with friends and bragged about potentially doing "something crazy" with the weapon. On June 17, 2015, he entered a historic church in the downtown portion of his state's capital and sat quietly for 45 minutes before fatally shooting Reverend Clementa Pinckney, who was also a state senator. He then put bullets into eight others—including an 87-year-old grandmother—before sparing a woman named Polly Sheppard so she could "tell the story." Unnervingly, the shooter appeared to smile as cops took him away in handcuffs.

South Carolina governor Nikki Haley (who's now the US ambassador to the UN under Trump) said she hoped that Roof would get the death penalty. Meanwhile, family members of the deceased prayed for mercy on the racist's soul at his first bond hearing. Back in August, a black inmate assaulted Roof in jail. Now, he might be the first person executed by the government since 2003.

Throughout his trial, Roof made a point of showing no remorse. He adorned his prison shoes with white supremacist symbols and seemed annoyed when family members of the victims testified about the characters of their lost loved ones. He was unapologetic about wanting to start a race war, and justified his actions by claiming that black men raped white women in a jailhouse manifesto.

"Sometimes sitting in my cell," Roof wrote in jail. "I think about how nice it would be to watch a movie or eat some good food or drive my car somewhere, but then I remember how I felt when I did these things, and how I knew I had to do something. And then I realize it was worth it."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Tonight, catch the season two premiere of NOISEY, VICELAND's original series looking into the cultures and artists behind some of the world's most compelling music scenes. This time, we head to the Bay Area to meet some of the world's most talented artists and see where they come from.

NOISEY airs Tuesdays at 10 PM on VICELAND.

Want to know if you get VICELAND? Head here to find out how to tune in.

Like the famous canaries that were first brought into coal mines from the early 1900s to detect carbon monoxide, creative solutions have long been used to mitigate some of the risk inherent in mining. Even so, human bodies have long borne the brunt of this cramped and strenuous occupation, from the creeping 'black lung' of coal miners to blasting injuries from explosive flyrock. So it's good news that the new frontier in mining is to remove them from proximity to physical danger as much as possible, perhaps one day entirely.

That's why automation is a big deal in heavy industries like mining and construction. Leading names of the industry, like British-Australian firms Rio Tinto and BHP and Canada's Barrick Gold, are all investing large sums of money in automating more and more of the process of mining, including an increasing use of driverless vehicles. But you can dispel images of retrofitted Teslas from your mind: these vehicles are seven metre high (23ft) giants that can move at 40mph and carry a 230 ton payload.

According to Rio Tinto, these vehicles can boost productivity while helping to improve mine safety at the same time. In the company's Australian mines, for example, many first generation driverless vehicles are actually operated remotely by crew hundreds of kilometers away, taking drivers away from the punishing summer heat (sometimes in excess of 110° F) and cutting down the risk of errors induced by fatigue or environmental stress.

Read the rest of this article on Motherboard.

In another time, Inka and Niclas Lindergård might have be tried for witchcraft. They seem capable of manipulating the Earth in impossible ways, like making the Northern Lights appear inside the mouth of a cave. There's no magic here though, or Photoshop tricks. Inka and Niclas promise their only real power is meticulous patience. If one had to classify their work, it would come under the umbrella of "landscape photography." After all, that is what they shoot. But the label hardly does them any justice—the pair's photography sits so far outside of the tradition.

You'll agree once you peek inside their second book, The Belt of Venus and the Shadow of the Earth. The title comes from one of the most photographed subjects in the world: the sunset. "The Belt of Venus" is the pink rim of light the sun casts across the skyline as it sinks, and the "Shadow of the Earth" is just that—the shadow Earth casts on its own atmosphere. Together, the two phenomenon create that beautiful pink-to-blue gradient we'd call a sunset.

Inka and Niclas aren't just nice photographers; they're captivating storytellers too. Here, they tell us how they met, recount a life-affirming stay in a Tanzanian coffee field, and describe the most magical beach in New Zealand.

The Belt of Venus and the Shadow of the Earth is available in hardcover here.

VICE: When did you meet each other?
Inka and Niclas: We met in the south of Sweden while studying photography in 2005. Niclas came from the north of Sweden, and had previously worked in the steel industry. He was into 80s metal and had the hair to match. Inka was into old photographic processes, she was a born vegetarian, and she sewed her own clothes in a sort of hippie, grandma style. We both found the other kind of strange and interesting. Our apartments were really close and we started spending a lot of time together in this super small village.

And when did you begin working together, creatively?
We started discussing doing a project together after graduation, at the same time we had also become a couple. We helped each other a lot while studying, so we knew the other's work very well. Then, years ago, we went to a friend's super simple house far out in a coffee field in Tanzania. The house's lighting ran on a car battery, and for one us to use the shower, the other had to pump on something like a step machine. From the porch we could gaze up at Mount Kilimanjaro.

We ended up staying there for three months, just working every day. We'd decided to execute every little grain of an idea we had, to figure out what we would be like as a duo. In the end, we used maybe four or five photographs from the thousands we took during our time in that house. It's been about nine years now and we no longer know any other way to work than together.

Much of your work in The Belt of Venus and the Shadow of the Earth looks impossible to have occurred naturally. Tell me more about achieving these images, technically.
We always keep it really simple gear-wise, we own a regular DSLR, a speedlight and one lens. It's not a big production with six flashes and a wind machine. It's about doing a lot with a little, and waiting for the right circumstances is a big part of the process. It's is such a great feeling when everything lines up perfectly, and the photograph becomes something more than what either one us could have planned for.

A lot of the works in the series revolve around performative acts that can only be experienced through the photograph. Everything you see in the images has happens at the moment of exposure. We treat our actions—be it throwing powder into the wind, building a sculpture out of branches or having light briefly colour some rocks—as a performances done in alliance with the landscape, the elements and the camera. We like to explore the camera's role as a bridge between the physical world and the photographic world.

Given the nature of your work, it only seems fair to ask: what are some of the most beautiful places in the world?
Iceland in general, but especially Jökulsárlón and the black beach covered with stranded icebergs. We've been there four times and each has been magic.

Then Koekohe Beach, in New Zealand. When we first arrived at the beach there was this totally magic, foggy, golden-pink sky. We immediately started running around in a panic, rearranging stuff and shooting thinking it will all go away in 10 minutes. After an hour the light was exactly the same, so we slowed down and really started to think about what to do next. We tried another idea for an hour or so, and the light just stayed exactly the same, like a sunrise frozen in the perfect position. We went on working the whole day until we were totally exhausted, and slowly the perfect sunrise just faded into a perfect sunset. It all felt surreal.

Third, Glacier Point in Yosemite at sunset. There's always a lot of people around since it's famous, but it's famous for a reason. We have to slide in Lofoten in Norway and The Tre Cime di Lavaredo in the Dolomites here as well.

You're shooting the natural world, but the pictures do have an otherworldly feeling to them. Were you ever interested in the occult?
We've always been fascinated with the mystique of nature, and we've searched for proof of the mystical everywhere: Norse mythology, Pagan religions, even spiritual postcards in gift shops. We're certainly interested in the aesthetics and the ritualistic spirit of occultists. We often refer to a photograph or a landscape as being "Death Metal," and we mean that in a very positive way.

What's next for you? What are you excited to work on in 2017?
We're exhibiting in Rotterdam in February and we just found out that we might go to Mexico to shoot in January. Otherwise, we just released our second book The Belt of Venus and the Shadow of The Earth. So now we are kind of naked, all the works we care about and have kept are now published. We get to start over in a way, that feels both exciting and a bit frightening. Right now we're working on these photographic sculptures; bending our pictures onto 3 dimensional plaster shapes, melting our images over natural objects. It's fairly a new direction for us.

As President-elect Donald Trump nears his first day in office, thousands of young undocumented immigrants in the United States are bracing for what will happen next. Trump has pledged to revoke a number of President Obama's immigration policies, including Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which granted work permits and temporary deportation relief to immigrants brought into the country under age 16. And while Trump has flip-flopped on what to do about DACA, Jeff Sessions, Trump's pick for attorney general, made it clear at a nomination hearing that he "would have no objection to a decision to abandon that order."

But if Trump terminates the program, it won't just impact the immigrant population—some 750,000 undocumented young people who have earned college degrees, joined the workforce, and enjoyed deportation relief as a result of DACA. Dismantling the program could also deal a significant blow to the US economy.

Ending DACA could decrease the national GDP by $433.4 billion over the next decade, particularly wounding states with the largest immigrant populations, according to a new report by the progressive think tank Center for American Progress (CAP), published this week.

"DACA has been such a significant life-changing policy for its recipients, and states and communities will feel the brunt of losing these workers," Silva Mathema, a senior policy analyst on immigration for CAP, told me.

About 87 percent of DACA recipients are currently employed, according to a CAP survey from last fall. The new report calculates what would happen if they all had to leave those jobs. Mathema told me CAP made their calculations based on a previous study on the economic cost of losing unauthorized workers, and the estimated impact of removing DACA "could be an underestimate," since DACA recipients tend to make higher wages than unauthorized workers.

"If you prohibit people from working on the books in jobs they're qualified for, those restrictions on the economy are going to reduce earnings and taxes paid by those workers."—David Kallick

If DACA recipients had to completely stop working, immigrant-saturated states would be hit the hardest. California, which is home to approximately 188,000 DACA workers, would lose $11.2 billion in revenue each year. Texas, with about 105,000 DACA workers, would lose $6.1 billion. New York, with about 33,000 DACA employees, would lose about $2.3 billion annually, according to estimates from the CAP report.

David Kallick, the director of the Immigration Research Initiative for the Fiscal Policy Institute, called the CAP study "very methodologically sound" but said there were "so many questions at this point" about the future administration's policy. For now, it's not clear how Trump will change immigration policy in the country or if a policy like DACA would be the first on the chopping block.

If Trump does overturn Obama's executive action, Kallick said, many DACA recipients may indeed continue to work—just without permits, and often in jobs for which they are overqualified.

"Some people might be pushed out of the labor force altogether, while some people might go back into lower-wage jobs and lower-economic-output jobs," Kallick told me. "DACA has allowed people to go to college and to advance in jobs in which they could be promoted. If you prohibit people from working on the books in jobs they're qualified for, those restrictions on the economy are going to reduce earnings and taxes paid by those workers."

That's not only a problem for the US economy at-large, but for the individual businesses that currently employ DACA workers.

"The businesses are hiring [DACA recipients] because they're qualified workers doing a good job, and if you go to businesses saying you have to fire workers who are good employees for you, that's going to be not popular for the businesses," Kallick explained. "It doesn't put into effective use the resources that are around you."

While the new CAP report spelled out what would happen if all DACA recipients were pushed out of the workforce, Daniel Costa, the director for Immigration Law and Policy Research for the Economic Policy Institute, pointed out that this would only happen if Trump enforced his early campaign promise to deport all 11 million undocumented immigrants. More recently, Trump has backtracked and stated that he will instead focus deportations on individuals with criminal records.

"If people are able to get DACA, they have to have relatively clean criminal records and have lived in the country for years, so they're the lowest priorities for deportation even under a Trump administration," Costa told me. "This means they'll probably stay around for a while and will have to work, so they'll have to go to the black market to find work that doesn't require documentation. A lot have gotten college degrees, and they'll be underutilized in labor markets and more susceptible to exploitation."

For longtime US residents like Greisa Martinez, an organizer with the immigrant youth organization United We DREAM, DACA was the path out of such exploitation.

"Before DACA, I was selling used cars in Dallas, earning $300 a week trying to get by and support my family," said Martinez, 28, who came to the US as a seven-year-old and is undocumented. "I know plenty people who used to serve food in fast-food restaurants and are now nurses in hospitals throughout the United States."

While ending DACA would certainly strip people like Martinez of opportunities, Steven Camarota, the director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a conservative think tank, told me the impact could be positive for native-born residents.

"If someone is illegally in this country and has to leave, what's the impact on the native born? Do their incomes go up? By itself, it's not a benefit to increase the GDP," Camarota said, claiming that ending DACA may improve work opportunities for US-born citizens.

But Kallick warned that revoking DACA work permits could "hurt the overall business climate" and even drive companies from the US market.

"We've benefited enormously by being a place that welcomes immigrants where they can thrive in the US economy," Fallick said. "If we're going to adopt an attitude of suspicion, it's going to make for a less attractive place for a globally oriented company to locate its businesses and to expand."

Follow Meredith Hoffman on Twitter.

Tuesday night, President Obama will deliver his final address to the nation before he leaves the White House from McCormick Place in Chicago at 9PM EST.

Not only will the outgoing president use the opportunity to reflect on his eight years in the oval office, he'll use the speech to address the future leaders of the country, revisiting the hopeful themes he spoke of during his first campaign, much like FLOTUS did during her final speech last week.

Obama decided not to give his parting remarks from the White House, but rather the place where his political career took off—his hometown of Chicago. He'll speak at McCormick Place, the convention center that overlooks Lake Michigan. On Saturday, thousands of people lined up outside the center in the frigid January air, just for a chance to score a free ticket.

If you're not one of the lucky 14,000 people who managed to get their hands on one, you can watch a livestream of the whole thing below, via the White House website.