1/20th of one percent of their annual budget.

If we attach penalties for violation of the UN bill of rights governments would be forced to hold a much higher standard of behavior.

I suggest you take a quick look at the UN Veto Powers. Then ask yourself: "how likely are ANY of these countries to want real penalties attached to the UN Bill of Rights?"

If your answer to the question above was "why, all five of them would give the UN Bill of Rights some teeth in a heartbeat, if only someone would suggest it to them", then go right ahead and do so.

Then report to your psychiatrist and tell him you need stronger meds....

was known to be effective by '97

From your link, it was known to have "great potential" by '97.

Which is NOT the same as "known to be effective".

Success in life in not measured by how well you know coding.

Agree completely.

Alas, talking in public about things you know nothing about tends to make you look like an idiot.

Not that Biden needed "One More Thing" to help him look like an idiot - he's had that down for years.

Assuming life favors a single-star system when in reality it favors a twin-star system.

I'm assuming you are a native of a twin-star system who happens to be doing anthropology work among the savages in this system.

Because otherwise, I can't figure out how you'd know that life favors a twin-star system, given that we know of zero twin-star systems that support life.

Joe Biden knows less about coding than my daughter.

Hell, he probably knows less about coding than he knows about guns...

Hint, Joe: firing a shotgun THROUGH your front door violates pretty much every rule about target identification that there is.

So, the Evil Corporation decides to not make its employees work Saturdays?

And you're complaining about this?

I gather that this means that it's only evil if a corporation makes YOU work Saturdays, but if they make the people who provide you services work Saturdays, that's just fine?

Job growth in one year means there are more jobs. Forever.

What an intriguing theory you have.

Note that if self-driving trucks were to become available, truck driver jobs would all disappear...forever. In other words, new technology sometimes makes jobs disappear.

And job growth last year doesn't guarantee the existence of jobs next year. Otherwise, the Great Depression would never have happened.

human beings with worthwhile ideas and commentary are not always absolutely perfect typists or rhetoricians.

So, it's your theory that people who don't know the difference between "their", "there", and "they're" have "worthwhile ideas".

Seems to me that in order to learn enough to develop a worthwhile idea, they'd have been exposed to enough schooling to not make the sort of mistakes one expects of seven-year-olds.

why don't we have kangaroos or elephants in the Americas?

We ate them?

there should be some treaties in place that would only allow space warfare if

Useful hint: first thing that happens when you decide to start a war is that you junk the Treaties.

Or do you really think all it takes to prevent war is a Treaty of Eternal Chumship between all nations on Earth?

What sort of "rebels" would have the training an ability to set up and operate a crew served weapon?

The "military veteran" kind. Off the top of my head, I don't know whether either Russia or Ukraine still has mandatory military service, but even without that, it's extremely unlikely that no civilians in Ukraine know how to use the weapon system.

As to who actually used the weapon, I'll go with the "rebels" who reported shooting down an AN-76 (?) about the right time yesterday, before deciding they hadn't really had the hardware or training to do so.

The USA and Germany were sinking each others civilian boats around the Atlantic during WWII

There were German civilian ships in the Atlantic between 1941 and 1945?

and the actual assassin (who wasn't the intended assassin) had gone off to sulk over the failure, and was walking down the street that the Arch-Duke's procession had chosen to avoid that traffic problem.

The rest, as they say, is history.