C'mon! You did not figure the AC was joking ( or badly trolling) at the mention of New Zealand?
NZ does not even have a fighter jet, so I'd say Burkina Faso has a better space capability.

And it does not mean free. You would pay a flat monthly fee based on the max supply (e.g. 100A) like your internet connection may be now.
Interestingly, increasing PV solar power is also driving things in that direction. Already, a huge portion of the costs of electricty companies are fixed by capacity, not marginal kwHr costs. So homes with rooftop solar power have their grid power (e.g. nighttime) subsidised by others.

Real men don't need a CPU. They just whistle into the modem and listen to the response.

Who? Not since Howard left Raj to move in with his wife.

Lawsuit money that is. Green Gold. Texas tea.

Well the first thing you know ol Bob's a millionaire,
Doctors said "Bob move away from there"
Said "Californy is the place you ought to be"
So they loaded up the truck and moved to Beverly.

Hills that is. Swimmin' pools, clean air.

How about a "Not The Nine O'Clock News" reference then?
  "In the words of John Cleese, whenever two or three are gathered together in one place, they shall perform the parrot sketch."

Or standardised spelling.

... and capitalisation of Grandma.

You mean, the US still has phones without SIMs? Locked to a carrier!?
No wonder cell-phone plans are so expensive compared to the rest of the world then. (When most things are cheaper in the US.)
Its sad. The US once led the world in antitrust law enforcement.

You can speculate on the root cause of murder, but simple demographic data explains the different numbers between the US and other developed countries.

The fact is that everywhere, homicide rates differ dramatically by age, gender, race and ethnicity. Some countries show bigger variation than the US does.
If you control for those variables, the difference mostly goes away.
e.g. compare data for whites of the same age and gender to Western Europe, US Hispanics to Latin America, or African Americans to Africans, and the US data does not look so different.

I don't see why this fact should give rise to cries of racism, when it is just as much sexist and ageist.

Most of us would not know the difference anyway. This is an international forum, so please avoid 2LAs and zip-codes.
Alabama? Alaska?

15 million light vehicles per year, so over 1 billion dollars, and they say it will save "13 to 15 lives per year and prevent as many as 1,125 injuries annually".

I don't want to get all Tyler Durden, but are there more effective ways of spending all that money? e.g. road improvements or driver education and law enforcement?

There is an east-west cultural difference here.

In the West, we have "plausible deniability", where we can't be 100% sure they knew they were telling lies.

In the East, a plain-as-day outright lie is more polite than saying "no, we withdraw from your treaty.".

That suggestion goes against other evidence, and simple logic that distraction contributes to accidents.
The simple point is that you have naively assumed the laws changed driver behavior in that particular case. But this is often not true.

That proves nothing, unless you can show that the law actually succeeded in substantially reducing cell-phone use in cars.
e.g. with data from the carriers showing reduced cell handovers. Were the laws strongly enforced and publicised?