You gotta be fucking kidding me. I remember trying to make an intercontinental call back in the late 90s. There was a good 5-6 second delay for it to go through, and when the connection was made we had to yell to be heard over the static and clicks and pops. Plus there was an annoying 1-2 second delay on the line and some echoing, which always resulted in starts-and-stops to the conversation as we tried to figure out whose turn it was to talk. Oh and it cost something like $1.50 per minute. Compare that to my last deployment in the Middle East where I could connect my phone to the camp wifi and make a free video call back home with essentially zero delay, great audio quality, and minimal stutter on the video. I think you're looking at the past with your rose coloured glasses on.

I don't understand what Clinton has to do with this ...

It's never been 10% of the value of the cow. All byproducts put together can be about 10% of the value of the cow, but hides have never made up more than 50% of that 10%, and are usually much less than that. The value of a hide varies depending on market forces but in recent years branded hide have never sold higher than about $80, and at times have fallen as low as $4. Higher quality unmarked hides can sell for more, but they're rarer since they require taking better care of the animals.

Nobody buys those phones because they tend to have a CPU that's about 5 generations behind the current flagships coupled with anemic RAM and storage. Plus they MAYBE run Android 9 if you're lucky and have a 6 megapixel camera. I may be willing to make some sacrifices in order to have a durable phone with an easily replaceable battery, but I'm not willing to make THAT many sacrifices.

An adult human needs between 50 and 90mg of Vitamin C per day. The spleen of a cow contains about 50mg per 100g of meat. A small (300kg) heifer has a spleen that's typically around 500g. Therefore a small cow's spleen has enough vitamin C to tide you over for something like 3 to 5 days. The rest of the cow also contains vitamin C, just in much lower concentrations.

Judging by the fact that: 1. Eskimos existed for a long time; and 2. There is zero fruit in the Arctic circle. I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that you don't have any clue what you're talking about. Entire societies have absolutely consisted on a meat-only diet, and done so rather successfully.

That's rather sophomoric. Value certainly has a subjective component, but given a common framework it's usually fairly objective. Otherwise currency wouldn't be a thing and even barter-based markets would have a tough time operating.

Nice to see a sensible response. Thank you.

It's useful if you want to make cheap backups of important files. Throw them in a RAR archive with a recovery record, and you can put them on CDs, DVDs, flash drives ... whatever. Cheap optical media in particular seems to be pretty bad for archival purposes, but becomes much more reliable if you have a way to detect and correct small amounts of random corruption.

There have been a number of whistleblowers who have demonstrated that a) using official channels is effective and b) trying to publish after fleeing the US ends up with prosecution attempts.

Assange did flee the country, so that's a pretty horrible comparison. He also dumped a massive trove of classified information which he helped steal, so I don't really understand why you thought that "look, this other guy who broke the law in the same way is also being prosecuted" was going to be a persuasive argument, but then clearly I couldn't understand the functioning of such a genius mind. None of your response is in any way a refutation of what I've said.

Um, .015% isn't 0.015, it's 0.00015. So your 1200 plane trips just turned into 12 plane flights. Obviously one SpaceX launch provides as much if not more value than those 12 flights.

You might want to look up how extradition laws work, because you sound really ignorant.

What a stupid argument. Osama Bin Laden never did anything on American soil either.

That amount of diversity is a fairly recent development for Canada, and incarceration rates have been on the upswing ... we'll have to see how things look in a couple decades. More importantly, Canada has fairly strict control over immigration, and doesn't have to deal with a large population descended from African slaves (they do, however, have a similar problem with the "indigenous" population). The really entertaining part is that, despite their incarceration being 1/5th of the US rate, Canada still has their own versions of retarded-silver-gun banging on about how there are way too many people in prison and it's all racist slavery or some such nonsense.