That money is spent buying American made munitions. We don't particularly care who is blowing up who with them as long as they aren't on the naughty list. If they are the CIA might sell them the munitions under the table, unless they're also on the CIA's naughty list. Regardless, the end result is American arms manufacturers make more money. As far as government spending goes it's not completely wasteful, but it does still spend my and your tax dollars on shit we wouldn't want to if we had the choice.

The federal government owns a lot of land that it could sell to cover the debt. Maybe it should start doing some of that.

Many of the countries where the USD is used as an unofficial second currency only due so because it's a better store of value than their own official currency. The USD can be used in six months to buy about the same quantity of goods or services as it will buy now, whereas a local currency may have lost half of its value by that point. If we start playing silly games with the printing press those other countries will have no reason to prefer dollars over their own currency and will start trying to get rid of them.

Frankly, I think we should aim for an even lower amount of inflation. No more than one-half percent per year, and ideally comfortably below that. Government also needs to be forced to have a balanced budget. No more spending money that they don't have. Cut spending, raise taxes, or meet in the middle. I don't particularly care, but we keep letting a bad problem grow worse.

You don't need to own a car if you don't want to. Automotive insurance is only required if you own and operate a vehicle and not all forms of insurance are mandated. There are plenty of people who don't need to own a car and can use taxis on the odd occasion they would need one and public transport options aren't available.

Medical insurance (and the system as well) would probably work better if it was limited to expensive emergency care. Car insurance doesn't cover oil changes or other mundane maintenance. I suspect that if more common medical services were removed from insurance it would result in a more competitive industry that's up front about costs to patients.

Canadians have the option of using US medical care if they're willing to pay for it. Many of them do. There is never as much medical care as the world needs. No system can provide it because our need is essentially limitless.

I think the more concerning issue with Canada is that they seem to actually be pushing medically assisted suicide as a choice for some people. This has resulted in some concerning cases. Here's one involving a young woman for for all I know had a treatable condition, but the healthcare system doesn't have the resources to diagnose and doesn't mind taking the less expensive option. At least they've continued to delay allowing people to use the program due to mental health reasons.

A VPN is dirt cheap and push button. Ease of use or cost is of minimal concern. Your biggest concern is whether or not you actually trust the provider because they have your data and nothing is stopping them. Your post is further idiotic because Texas has none of your information. The porn website does though, and once again it's a matter of how much you trust them with that.

Your issue is only a problem if that state is authenticating the person and keeping the records. I very much doubt that if this were a story about purchasing firearms that you'd have the same concerns.

That's not much different than a kid trying to buy alcohol or cigarettes. It's illegal for them so they don't go to the legitimate business, but instead find something that skirts the law.

The real issue is that there's no way to know if someone is actually in Texas and websites outside of the US aren't going to care either way just like a US website that only does business in the US isn't going to care about European GDPR requirements. Even if a person is physically in Texas, their VPN end point may not be, which a website has no way of knowing.

The website still has other problems. A kid using a fake ID to buy beer is going to stand out. A kid using a parent's credit card to appear to be of age looks no different to the site than the actual card holder using the site. Never mind distributed systems that don't have much of any centralized authority. How do you stop a minor from torrenting some naughty bits?

I don't have a philosophical argument against banning minors from consuming pornography. We already do it with plenty of other things. The real issue is that there's no real way to actually enforce these kinds of blocks as the Internet doesn't have the same physical constraints that we typically deal with when making these kinds of laws.

Putin will probably go out like Stalin. Everyone will be too terrified to approach him that he'll die in agony because no one wants to incur his wrath by daring to check on him. Putting a bullet in his head is too kind.

It's not quite as weird as the pope who had a predecessor dug up to be put on trial. As much as a circus as modern politics seem like at times, there's always something that's a whole level of bizarre beyond where we're at.

What's going on behind the scenes for a greater offer to be turned down? I'd be happy that anyone would be willing to part with their money to acquire my flaming sack of poo if I were currently stuck holding the bag.

Who is assuming anything of the sort these days.

I'm not even sure why this is making the news. Google cancels products and lays off various teams all the time. Is this just some way of showing that not everyone getting fired is due to protests against Israel or something like that?

Intel knew what they were doing. Letting the CPU be pushed that hard made for bigger bars on benchmarks, so they had no reason not to just wink and nod while the motherboard manufacturers used those Intel approved settings. If they didn't, their own product wouldn't have the bigger bars and each company knew that every other company would do exactly the same thing so even if there were issues, it wouldn't be just them.

Clearly because it works. Same reason people are still sending emails on behalf of their good friend, the prince of Nigeria, even though that's become a literal meme.

Any company that doesn't charge a subscription fee or charge a premium for their hardware will eventually turn to pimping out their customer base to advertisers to make money. Their employees aren't going to work for free and if they have shareholders they aren't going to be satisfied with a reasonable ROI.

Any other company similar to Roku that you might buy from instead will eventually wind up in the same situation and start doing the same thing. I guess you'll have to buy another box and repeat the process all over again. I guess you could buy Apple's equivalent product, but that's going to cost you quite a bit more.

Don't underestimate my ability to waste more time for your company than the months service fee makes up for.

Eventually your lawyers will become involved and that's really not going to be cost effective for you and the lawyers being natural parasites will be glad to have me creating billable hours for them.

If they know your serial number, they probably have physical access and at that point it's probably too late for any kind of password policy to do any good. Not that it's too difficult for a company to comply with not having the initial password based off of a serial number, but any algorithmic scheme to generate passwords makes it somewhat guessable if you know enough about the algorithm.