Good for you. Perhaps your wife would be better off with a 4gb model, maybe one without unified memory from just a couple of years ago. You could save a boatload.

Apple / Mac is a premium brand (not necessarily a premium product). Practically nobody who is in the market for a Mac really cares about "price starting from", it's either in their budget or it's not. Why pretend that 8gb is enough for much of anything these days--just do not offer configurations which are not reasonable for the day and age.

That's pretty meta, is it not? Being that's essentially the 'crime' they charged him with, that is: He valued his property at a certain amount, the bank agreed and allowed him to leverage his ownership in those properties in order to obtain a loan.

Why not run the potable water through a heat exchanger and return the city's water back to the city but slightly warmer? Use the city's water pipes as a giant reverse geothermal heat sink? Datacenters get cool servers, thousands of people get to take showers and flush their toilets. Everyone wins.

The whole left right paradigm that people continue to use has been bullshit for at least a hundred years. It's merely tool to instill an "us vs them" tribalistic response in a people who are to be controlled, not unlike what a magician / illusionist does: distract people's attention while they pull the rabbit out of the hat with the other hand.

Except in this case it's the establishment elite vs the plebeians, and instead of pulling a quarter out of your ear, they rob you blind at every opportunity, send your job overseas, use your tax money to bomb the crap out of people you never knew existed so the establishment can monopolize their resources, and finally once those people are completely broken, they allow them to illegally and uncontrollably enter your country and replace you altogether, making you pay for the privilege.

Let's be honest; if Germanys' gas use fell, it was because a certain someone blew up a certain pipeline, and the price of gas rose to ridiculous and unaffordable levels, impacting industry and residents alike. Not because solar and wind replaced it.

If you backtrace the ownership of the biggest media companies, they have the same handful of billionaires and colossal conglomerates, Vanguard Group, BlackRock, State Street Corp, and a handful of others, who also own large chunks of any significant company in any and all industries you can imagine. There exists a deep and highly interconnected ownership network of virtually all public companies, and most large privately held companies as well.
If they have the same ownership, they have the same agency; and if the company or individual who owns 10, 15, maybe 20 percent of your shares, and perhaps more importantly, finances your loans, calls up the CEO and says jump, they expect them to ask "how high?!" These companies have portfolios bigger than many (most) countries GDPs. If you do not think they can't exert influence to accomplish their goals, to control narratives, to keep things in the news or off the news, you're a special kind of fool.

I'll just leave this here. And I'll also note that it's become soooo much worse in the 25 years since that segment originally aired. The top 100 news outlets are all owned or controlled by SIX individuals / companies.

Nobody ever said that a vaccination stopped diseases, but the numbers demonstrated that there were fewer fatalities where it was more widely distributed

Point of fact, the entire media industrial complex, the government and its agents, and the CEOs of the manufacturers at one point or another have all said just that! The vaccines were 100% effective, when in fact the manufacturers did no reasonable studies to see if it actually did reduce infection at all! You don't remember how they basically bucked the effectiveness study by also vaccinating the control group, "because it was inhumane to deny them this awesomely effective treatment"
Soon, the effectiveness was reported at 98% and how quickly that number slid to below 60% in the months following rollout, and then you needed a first booster, second booster, third booster of the same formulation, well after the virus had mutated to the point where the vaccine would target it with virtually no efficacy. Finally they stopped reporting on effectiveness at all. Simultaneously, they down played the risks, especially to young people at every turn.

On your second point, there is no such evidence. European, and Asian countries with comparable living conditions to the USA, which did not shut down at all, or have mandated vaccines have shown no difference in terms of health outcomes in any age group--except that by some miracle they are not currently suffering from the excess death phenomenon to nearly the same degree. Interesting.

But for the sake of argument, pretend something like this passes nationwide, and to view pornography (for various definitions of this, it's somewhat nebulous) you need to verify your age. So how is that accomplished exactly? A federal clearing house that matches you to an ID on file?

You already have to be 18 to buy lottery tickets, to get tattoos, to buy rifles and shotguns to sign contracts, 21 to buy booze and smokes and hand guns, and so many other age related laws. There's longstanding precedent to try to keep young people out of adult troubles / situations. The easy answer the: ID that the government makes you keep and maintain.

Since there's already a centralized database (and it's very extensive) Give up your driver's license number and date of birth, or use an alternative third party age verification system, and you can have all the smut you want. Sure, enterprising kids could still get the information and get in, but at least an attempt is made.

I'm pretty liberal, in the classic meaning, and I firmly believe age restriction on pornography is appropriate. It's a relatively recent phenomenon that porno is expected to be widely and freely available to everyone, at any time, at any place. If you believe kids should be able to access pornhub on their smartphones without parental veto... Well, it's more telling about you than it is about Montana.

Truly, good riddance.

Percentages can be misleading, though. The article didn't talk about real numbers, only percent increases; presenting the delta imparts very little information on its own, and I find that suspect. Suppose the global car market is 1 million per year, and electric cars are produced at a rate of 10,000 a year, but only 1000 sold the previous year, while this year 1260 sold. This means 17740 cars are sitting there gathering dust. You could still claim that the growth of sales were 26% over the previous year, without letting on that what you're trying to sell as a resounding success is in reality a dismal failure of the greatest magnitude.
I'm not saying that situation reflects reality, only that there are liars, damned liars, and then there consultants.

As long as a plant stores carbon in the form of cellulose and lignin, and it continues to grow, it is a net CO2 sink. That's all that matters; anything else is a matter of efficiency; maybe one species is better than another. Kudzus strike me as an option. We could literally take that cellulose and turn it into neutral charcoal (burn it) and dump it in a subduction zone in deep part of the ocean, or make giant algae farms and pump the resulting biomass underground. I'm certain either would be more efficient (energy and economically) than this operation.

Personally, I took that change as a feature upgrade. So little of the suggested videos on that page were of interest to me that I long ago set my youtube shortcut to my subscriptions page--i.e. stuff I'm actually interested in seeing.