Dude, Robert, drink some raw milk, relax, and go back to filming the Real Food Show. Everything will be fine, friend. And if it's not, why not try to eat some roadkill bear? It'll undoubtedly make you feel better.

I like your perspective overall, but you're fundamentally wrong about the use of a driver's license during a traffic stop -- it's used to identify you, so they can also run you for warrants. It's not just about whether or not you're currently licensed to drive.

We can always hope that the pigs who fucked-up with the user names will be skinned alive, but of course, we all know this will never happen because pigs enjoy an inordinate amount of immunity totally unwarranted by their well-below average intelligence.

Wikipedia has an article for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Yes, they become an economic superpower and they slowly take the place of the USA on the world stage.

A very nice country, with very nice, hard-working but still fun-loving (take that, calvinists!) people, thank to them not having religious hangups and neuroses.

He sent me the first e-mail I ever received, some 40 years ago...

It was so early that it actually was printed by some service and (snail-)mailed to me...

More than 35 years ago, well before the Internet, BBSes ruled.

One I was a pillar of was nothing but a wall where you would post anonymously (or not).
The software was written to verify the typing rate to make sure that no text was uploaded

CHALLENGE ACCEPTED!

I wrote a special terminal program that would randomize the time between characters to foil that BBS's rejection of uploads...

(Oh, it worked, and the dude running the show never found out).

(Note: I'm against the profligate financial support the US is providing Israel, for a variety of reason)

The problem with the idea of "stop sending billions to Israel" is that it's not actually that we send, you know, truckloads of cash to Israel for it to spend wherever it wants. Most of our aid to Israel is in the form of arms and equipment that is specifically to be purchased from US companies -- so most of that money actually ends up staying in the US, and if you were to take that money off the table, then several large US contractors -- and thousands of employees -- would then feel that pinch.

(Not that that makes it a bad idea, mind you)

Y'know, it feels intuitive to assume that going through some sort of Massively Traumatic Event (e.g. WW2 or Great Depression) would have depressed survivability, but apparently that's -- again, totally counter-intuitively -- not necessarily supported by studies.

For example, this study comparing Holocaust Survivors lifespans to control group in Israel demonstrated that while Holocaust survivors had more chronic health conditions, "mean age at death was significantly higher in the survivor group compared with the control group."

I've seen some hypothesis that these sorts of massive events sadly cull the population, on average leaving a population that will actually be hardier than otherwise, which ... both makes sense and is a bummer.

Technically, but I think it's still an important point to make, you don't actually need approval from the authorities to drive a car, you just need it to drive a car on public streets. If you want to take your car to a private raceway, or if you have a large enough property where you could drive a car on it, you don't need any sort of approval for that.

So that's meaningfully different from this kind of rule, where you can't even fly a drone on your own private property.

(Disclaimer: I'm an Israeli, though rather opposed to the genocidal attempt at ethnic cleansing currently being conducted by my country. That said, keep that in mind in terms of potential bias in this post).

It's not precisely correct to say that the US has sent hundreds of billions of dollars to Israel. it's a bit more of a 'closed ecosystem' than that -- the vast majority of financial support the US has provided Israel has been in the form of weapons and munitions, which Israel has then purchased from US companies. In other words, while in some respects this absolutely is financial and military support of Israel, in addition to that it's also a vast transfer of tax revenues from us (I'm a tax-paying US citizen these days) to the military-industrial complex and more specifically American companies.

So most of this money has stayed in the US, it's just been transferred from the people and their representative government to commercial entities.

Ah yes, the "I'm going to take my toys and go home" threat, uttered by children and oligarchs everywhere.

Companies unwilling to abide by a country's laws are welcomed to not operate in that country. These threats happen all the time and so far what it takes to get a company to not operate in a given country is pretty much a legal order (see: Russian and Iranian sanction laws).