Turkey is the best, most flavorful, most nutritious meat available, if it's done correctly.

Bison is a bit more nutritious than turkey, both in the good stuff it contains more of and the bad stuff it contains less of (this source is a bit more neutral in their comparison). If you like beef, bison tastes really good, and is much healthier than beef as well.

What is reality is that all statistics say that one of the best ways to increase your risk of getting killed is to carry a gun.

I wonder what the statistics look like when you break this down farther. There are subgroups. For example, some people own firearms who have little to no training. Not just in the mechanics of how to use them, but tactical training. Others have varying levels of training. I would expect the first group to meet a bloody end more often than the second group. Furthermore, how often does someone wield a firearm defensively and end up dead, vs. the experienced user who wisely chooses to leave his concealed firearm holstered because brandishing his firearm would be a tactical failure?

The statistic you mention is true, but it is a very broad brush. The real world is far more nuanced. I would be very curious to see it broken out in more detail, but I have so far not seen anything.

20 countries, ha ha, try keeping track of 50 states and 8 territories like in the US

That is not even the worst part. Sales tax in the USA can be owed to states, counties, municipalities, and other vaguely-defined-but-real government entities. This means that even in the same state, or same county, sales tax may vary. You could walk across the street and pay different sales tax on the exact same item because that street is a boundary between tax jurisdictions.

There are companies that do nothing except keep track of the constantly-changing tax rates all over the country and make that data available to merchants. This includes not just rates by location, but by item - luxury goods may be taxed at a higher rate, staple food items taxed lower. In some locations, tax rates go up the more you spend, a progressive sales tax. There may be "tax holidays" certain days of the year where no tax is charged - but that may be only at one level of government, for example, you may pay state sales tax but no local taxes.

Taxes suck.

If Gucci won a court injunction against a knockoff maker of handbags, then Google could still index the knockoff makers results, even though it harmed Gucci - because 'free speech'?

M$, lol.

I suspect Blu-ray playback quality is higher than HD streaming.

Blu-ray is much better quality than HD streaming. In order to fit all those bits in the internet pipes, they need to be highly compressed. Blu-ray is (supposed to be) compressed losslessly, and the HDMI interface has plenty of bandwidth for all those ones and zeros.

I have streamed many movies from different services, and watched plenty of movies on Blu-ray. Streaming is great because it is convenient, but ranges from acceptable to "blurrier than DVD" with HD content. I still buy or rent Blu-rays and actually use them because the quality is significantly better.

Not necessarily true: if you want the system to be able to mount a volume without user intervention (or boot from it), it must know the whole password, a hasj is not enough for decryption.

Why would you password-protect a file or volume to begin with if you want the system to be able to decrypt it without user intervention? The purpose of encryption is to prevent unauthorized access, not allow it.

I'm sure this is meant half jokingly, but American football as a whole is in trouble. Schools are starting to shut down their programs due to lack of interest. Parents, worried about their kids' brain health, are pushing them to play other sports. In time, the talent dropoff will be dramatic enough to significantly affect big college and pro football.

This is a legitimate concern (for the NFL). Fewer children playing will dry up the talent pool in another decade when those children would be at the age for the NCAA and (eventually) NFL. Sure, plenty of children will play, but consider how few of them have the necessary talent to succeed in the NCAA, and how few of those have the talent for the NFL. I did the math once and it is a small fraction of one percent of high school football players actually make it to the NFL, and most of them suck at the sport anyway. At any given time there are only enough good players to make three or four teams in the NFL.

The NFL itself is also really unpopular, with Roger Goodell pissing off the NFL's fans at least once every season and getting booed any time he shows up on TV in front of a live audience (e.g. Super Bowl, NFL draft). I think the only reasons the NFL is still popular are: fantasy football is still a huge thing, even drawing people in that hate the sport (I know people who hate the game but still play fantasy); and some vestigial attachment to one's home team, essentially pride in one's city to include its sports teams.

The decline for the NFL has accelerated much faster than expected. The league's necessary adjustments for safety has made the game less interesting to watch and the recent anthem "controversies" are not helping. Attendance and viewership is down. The decline has already started and doesn't look like it will abate soon. Think that football is too big to fail? 80 years ago Boxing was the #1 sport in America. Look at the state of boxing today.

I keep hearing these arguments, but have not seen any evidence to back them up. Ratings fluctuate, and are on a general down trend, but nothing massive - it is not like the sport is unpopular, it is just not quite as popular as it was previously. It does seem, however, that ratings have followed the general trend of everything receiving lower ratings.

This makes sense, as sports in general (in the USA) seem to have declining ratings. Cord cutting? Younger generation caring less? Who knows? It is a complex issue and there is likely not one cause, e.g. "the NFL is killing itself with how it changes the game."

After all, if the military could make its own decisions about how to spend money, it'd be "wasted", so it "needs" Congressional "oversight". That's the root of the problem.

Article I Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution has not one but three clauses that enumerate Congress's authority over the military, including this one:

To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;

Back in the 18th century, military coups were more common than they are today. In fact the Articles of Confederation that predate the Constitution were even more restrictive than the Constitution: we barely had any military for the first decade. The compromise was to have a stronger military, but have a bit more oversight, especially with the budget. The goal was to have a military where commanders could focus on doing what they do well, killing shit, while Congress could regulate them (e.g. UCMJ) and pull the plug on relatively short notice and dry up funding if required.

Of course, ever since the end of WW2 and the start of the Cold War, the military budget is just a pork buffet. I seriously doubt there is any risk of a military coup in the USA, or any other concerns that prompted the budget micromanagement that we have today.

I also blame Bush 2 for a lot of the military problems we have, including the one called out in the article. Back in the mid-2000s, he insisted we needed more "boots on the ground" (i.e. Army and Marines) without increasing the overall military size. He gutted the Air Force and Navy. Probably half of those cuts were necessary regardless, the other half hurt. The lack of training called out in the article is a symptom of the larger issue of "doing more with less" - not necessarily a bad idea, but it has to be implemented correctly. Skimping on core training such as "navigating and piloting naval vessels" and "working 100 hour weeks and getting insufficient sleep" is not doing more with less: it is doing less with less. Source: I was active duty in the mid-2000s while Bush 2 was President.

Well then I guess they need to upgrade the encryption used because it's clearly and objectively inadequate, seeing as it's being overridden by hostile signals.

I think you have your news stories mixed up. US Navy ships have had several mishaps the past year due to incompetence of the personnel piloting their ships. Several civilian ships in a very specific part of the sea near Russia have had GPS tell them they are some place they are not (e.g. floating in the water in the middle of an airport, on land) due to Russian interference.

Military GPS is more accurate and secure than civilian GPS. That still appears to be true.

The way it always should have been!

I agree. Why should Oracle (or Sun, previously) be on the hook for providing security updates to five year old versions of Java? That is a logistical nightmare - multiple branches, multiple test configurations for each, and a ton of time and effort. Java updates very rarely break backwards compatibility anymore, so users should update.

360 degree turn? why was he flying in a circle?

To bleed altitude. Commercial airliners make terrible gliders, but still, they technically are gliders when the engines are no longer operational. In this case, the airplane glided to the Azores but had too much altitude and needed to stay in the air a little bit longer while not moving too far away: a perfect use case for flying in a circle.

Captain Piche had to execute one 360 degree turn, and then a series of "S" turns, to dissipate excess altitude.

Of course the government can't admit that the planes were full of chemtrail chemicals because that would reveal the chemtrail conspiracy!

Obligatory xkcd

The US government has a law that says that businesses must accept US dollars.

What law? I do not believe there is a US federal law that requires private businesses or individuals to accept currency from the Federal Reserve Bank. We all choose to do so because it is incredibly convenient and there are many laws and statues that encourage it.

You are correct. While it is legal tender for all debts, it is not a requirement to accept it. Furthermore, the word "debt" implies repayment. There is a difference between a straight-up trade (buying something at a register), receiving goods in advance (eating dinner, then paying the bill), and financing a debt (buying a car using a loan). There are nuances between those scenarios that affect legal requirements for payment, and furthermore, an additional consideration is payment in dollar equivalents such as using a credit card to purchase something using dollars, but not physical currency.

The long and short of it is you are correct, most transactions have no requirement to use U.S. dollars, but everyone does so anyway because nobody barters in livestock anymore.