Are you stupid enough to think there are what, unpaid invoices?

NATO allies gathered at the Wales Summit in 2014 and signed the Defense Investment Pledge.

The commitment was explicit: All allies spending less than 2% of their GDP on defense promised to "move toward" that 2% target within a decade (by 2024). They also committed to spending at least 20% of their defense budgets on major new equipment and research.

For the first seven years of that decade, Europe largely dragged its feet. The numbers tell a story of persistent shortfall:
- According to European Commission data, if EU member states had actually met the 2% threshold between 2006 and 2020, it would have injected an extra â1.1 trillion into European defense.
- By 2021â"just three years before the deadlineâ"only 7 out of the 21 EU countries that were NATO members at the time were actually meeting the 2% target. Major economies like Germany, Italy, and Spain were hovering between 1.2% and 1.4%

You're retarded, by the way.

Shall we ask where inflation came from?
We had well over a decade, nearly two with near-zero interest rates (which was partly government jiggering the numbers but it was low) that seemingly exploded a handful a years ago.

This. The problem isn't the technology; that can demonstrably be shown to work in models and simulations because of things like - as you say - needing less space between vehicles, and also more complex things like reducing capillary action in the overall traffic flow (the stop-start effect you often get in heavy traffic). The reason why you don't see those benefits is the growing number of entitled drivers who ignore the signage in the hope of gaming the system for personal gain (e.g. shorter travel time), so you do need robust enforcement with stricter tolerances and more punitive fines to try and deter that.

It's the classic Prisoner's Dilemma. The best solution for the greater good is to obey the signage, but the best solution for the individual is almost always to look out for Number One. Smart traffic flow systems do still seem to improve things, despite entitled drivers, although that's probably more down to the enforcement measures keeping those bending the rules from bending them as far as they'd like to.

What an utterly naive interpretation of world history you have. I can assure you, if you'd been a Jew being rounded up for extermination in WW2 you'd have a different opinion. Likewise, if you were Chinese or Korean being subjugated by Imperial Japan, you'd have a different perspective. There is such a thing as a "just war" even though you somehow ignore the concept. It's usually when your opponent starts the war and is hell bent on eradicating you and your way of life.

Alas, you sit there in perfect safety and comfort, passing judgement on those who sacrificed fa more than you can ever imagine so you could impugn their sacrifices.

Banned for who? And who's going to enforce this ban?

You have to remember any treaty (a) must have signatories that agree to follow it and (b) there must be a method of enforcement. If you lack either of these two conditions, the treaty has no effect.

Not sure how you think you could pull that off, but whatever.

Again...exactly how do you plan to accomplish this? It's not like Iran hasn't been firing missiles at our carriers this whole time. Yeah, it's a halfhearted effort by the Iranians, but what exactly do you think would happen to Iran if you managed to even damage one of our carriers, much less sink one? I can describe it thusly: the American gloves would come off. Iran would be plastered into oblivion via conventional bombardment, and there's very little Iran could do to stop it. Sure, we'd take losses, but the Iranian regime would cease to exist in totality. America has had this option available to it since day one. We haven't exercised it. Not because we couldn't do it but because we chose not to. Do not mistake restraint for a lack of capability.

Is that correct?

I'm trained as a righty (born ambi) so my fighting stance is left side out, left arm blocking, right arm striking, initially.

That results in hips and stance angled to my right.

I'm cross-eye dominant so I always second-guess, but I don't remember the other students in martial arts class being different.

I recall that this was discovered a long time ago when sales and marketing people realised that people would tend to turn right after they enter a store. I also seem to recall that this didn't hold true for left-handed people.

It would be interesting to see data from countries that are left-hand traffic. Streams of people in left-hand traffic countries tend to walk on the left side, and tend to move to the left if someone is walking towards them - which tends to be fun when walking about a right-hand traffic country! Though given these results were also tested in Japan, which is left-hand traffic, I'd expect there isn't a difference.

True Threats have a legal standard and specificity of person, place, and time are elements.

Criminal Threatening usually has a state statute.

The summary sounds much more like "muh feels" and conclusory pleading so it's probably not true to the legal standard.

How many arrests were made?

Also getting arrested for a social media post is a special kind of stupid on all sides
  Posts are almost always powerless and can just get you in trouble. Don't do it to blow off steam. Or for clout.

Not worth it, get out there and take action if you mean it. Don't blab about illegal fantasies.

like a bounty-seeker scorned.

Shoulda just paid 'em.

He sounds quite knowledgeable and it looks like he'll continue whipping Defender until morale improves.

It's worth noting that the black market would pay handsomely for most of his discoveries but retribution is sweeter than cash.

I get the sentiment.

Right, it's PERFECTLY RATIONAL to base your spending models on the sole circumstance of not one, but two successive global wars that reduced every other competitive western industrial economy to ashes and decimated their working age populations for a generation but left the US nearly unscathed.

That's absolutely reasonable to assume that's "normal", of course. The change of economic context came from TAX POLICY. Perfectly sane answer.

European leaders good enough?
European leaders and officials have acknowledged or admitted shortfalls in meeting NATO's defense spending guidelines (the 2% of GDP target agreed in 2014).
Key Examples

Angela Merkel (former German Chancellor): In reflections tied to her memoir and discussions around Trump's criticisms, Merkel admitted that Germany's inability to meet the NATO defense spending targets set in 2014 was a "weak point" for Berlin. Germany long spent well below 2% (often around 1.3â"1.5%), and this was a recurring point of tension.
Broader European admissions and acknowledgments:
Multiple leaders and NATO officials have publicly recognized that many European allies fell short for years after the 2014 Wales Summit pledge. For instance, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg (and later Mark Rutte) repeatedly noted that European allies and Canada had under-invested, describing U.S. criticisms (including from Trump) as "fair" on this issue, while highlighting post-2022 increases due to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Countries like Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and others were frequently cited as not meeting the target until recent years. By 2024, a record number (23 out of 32 members) reached or exceeded 2%, but this came after prolonged shortfalls that leaders implicitly or explicitly accepted.

Context from summits and statements: At various NATO meetings (e.g., under Trump pressure), European politicians admitted the need to "prove reliability" and increase spending, with some German officials in 2017 acknowledging underinvestment post-Cold War. Spain and others have openly discussed delays or stretched definitions of "defense spending" while committing to eventual compliance.

Criminals is the excuse, an AI Surveillance Police State is the point.

Everything in the rule is sensible for a dictator.

No, I'm pointing out where the slippery slope goes. The US has its approach to business ownership and control, China has theirs, the rest is semantics.

Functionally, there is not a lot of difference between a company with direct ties to the Chinese government that is obligated to share data on the QT, because that is what Chinese law says they have to do, and a US one that receives a National Security Letter and does the same, because that's what US law says they have to do. It's pretty much an open secret at this point that the NSA et al are plugged into most of the big tech companies and have been for ages (cf. Room 641a), so if the US and China were to end up in a game of tit-for-tat on this and don't hit the brakes it could go an awfully long way in directions that might not be immediately apparent, and that will have repercussions elsewhere in the world as well.

ALL of them, from the tech giants all the way down to the smallest of "Mom & Pop" stores. They pay their taxes (mostly), then Congress allocates a proportion of those taxes to the DoD's budget, which then spends them on the MIC. Pretty much the same as any country, including China.

The US is stepping onto a very slippery slope here, and if the Chinese start to respond in kind then it's an awfully long way down given it's pretty clear by now that Trump has no clue that playing tit-for-tat isn't a good strategy. They could legitimately start with Boeing and the like, of course, because they directly manufacture military hardware, then move onto the service/support part of the MIC and companies like Microsoft and OpenAI, and if things really get out of control into the supply chain, then that's an awfully big web that is going to reach into some very unexpected places, including some of those "Mom & Pops". The rest of the world will quite naturally want no part of that trade war (which is what this really is), so don't be surprised if this kind of thing just accelerates their on-going pivot away from US suppliers to reduce the impact of any blowback.

Fortunately, as we saw with tariffs, Xi Jinping (and just about everyone else) does seem to realise that is a poor strategy though, so it might not be a fast decent into chaos before sanity prevails, but that also just buys more time for the smarter players to make their pivot towards alternative supply chains.