China has attacked most of its neighbors, but can you possibly justify their ongoing military incursion into Bhutan? Do you think it was to protect national security?

You have a very strong emotional opinion for an admitted ignoramus. If you calm down, I'll be happy to discuss this point with you rationally, otherwise I'll just leave you stewing in your emotional ignorance.

China sees taking Taiwan as in their interests, and indeed, controlling the entire first island chain to be in their interests.

Currently the US is involved in two different wars. The US weapon supply is depleted, but it will be rebuilt, stronger than before. If China does not move militarily now, then they will not have another window of opportunity like this one for a long, long time.

A balloon is not static, it moves with the atmospheric system it is in. Ergo, it tells you how that system evolves. A drone cannot do this.

A drone can stay put, relative to the ground, telling you how a location's atmosphere evolves. A balloon cannot do this.

These are solving completely different types of problem.

You could, of course, construct a hybrid, as balloons are traditionally single-shot. If a balloon carries the measurement gear and a drone capable of carrying that same gear PLUS a deflated balloon, then you can have something that operates as a balloon until it reaches some pre-set location, whereupon the balloon's gas is released and the drone flies the ensemble to a collection point.

This is an example of "overthinking," also known as "underthinking" or "over-concluding."

Based on your UID, you're old enough to remember when games actually worked at release and have no excuse for your ignorance. The current situation is one we allowed to happen with prebuys and a passive acceptance that all software is now effectively in beta forever.

It doesn't need to be like that and you damned well know better.

You can tell this one spent his childhood expanding his spider collection.

Kids in suburbs "socialize" with great enthusiasm. They are constantly at one another's houses, or borrowing mom's crossover to go somewhere with their friends. Before they can drive, mom is wrecking the planet driving her progeny all over creation for every kind of sportsball you've ever heard of, and a number you haven't. The parents all have each others phones because they're constantly trying to figure out which friend their kid has absconded with, or which one gave them the pot they got caught with. Phone storage is permanently at 100% capacity because they're filled with stupid videos of their friends.

Honestly guy, the more you say here, the more painfully obvious it is that you have lived a sad, lonely life.

Maybe. I suppose that's a side benefit that some are excited about, and the worst of those will abuse it. Mostly these laws are symbolic: the ruling class doesn't really care about any of this. They're busy arranging government contracts for their spouse's private business, getting their kids no-show non-profit chairmanship jobs, etc. The "ban" is their sop to the latest moral panic, and enforcing it generally would be nasty, so they just enact it with no real enforcement plan and get back to lining their pockets. Whenever some kid causes a headline making outrage, the narrative will include accusations of negligence with regard to social media bans, and they'll persecute the kid's parents, but beyond that nothing of note changes.

Why would you doubt it? China has never been reticent to enter war in any way, and certainly has been provoking for the last couple decades.

In the Chinese worldview, peace can only come though the sword of the emperor.

I'm not sure if you understood that I am saying the Matrix is unwatchable or not.

So you don't think the 1st Amendment is important. You are OK with the government having power, but don't believe the people should have power. You have a right to that particular ridiculously ignorant belief. What you don't have is the right to infringe upon others rights. You don't have to like the 1st Amendment, but you do have to abide by it.

Maybe link to one or several of those channels.

Google set its SEO guidelines to favor longer articles. So that's what we ended up with.

Google is responsible here. The could penalize websites that have too many ads. But they won't because that is how they make money.

It's a clear example of a monopoly making the world worse.

Banning teens from social media will never be widely successful - Because it doesn't need to be.

These laws have nothing to do with protecting kids, and everything to do with stripping adults of their privacy. The kids will find workarounds like VPNs or AI generated IDs, because they have no alternative; meanwhile most adults will grudgingly hand over their ID cards and subject themselves to completely untrustworthy biometric tomfoolery rather than go cold-turkey from their daily doom scrolling.

And the world gets worse for all of us.

The entire point of gaming consoles is that we can stick a game in, turn it on, and we're more-or-less instantly in the game. Absent that fundamental benefit, why exactly would anyone want yet another locked down computing appliance in their house?

I'm not sure Sony has really thought this one through - They're not just killing physical media (and more importantly, second-hand markets), they're shifting markets entirely. Rather than competing with only Microsoft and Nintendo, they're effectively making themselves nothing more than another AAA gaming studio combined with a lock-in to their walled garden of a marketplace.

Effectively, they're now competing with Steam rather than Nintendo. And unlike Sony, most customers like Valve.

If it's in your physical possession and out of their reach it's not "digital"

Sorry you feel that way, but it's a reasonable take on reality. There are two types of situations: Situations where you want to learn about X and situations where you need to know the answer to some very specific, but narrow question about X. For the second question, giant, ad-laden websites where the answer is buried in a pile of unrelated information are basically a disservice. You're paying for the information not just by watching their ads, but by wading through all the other crap.

In an ideal universe, there would be some sort of micropayment system, where websites earned money just from people visiting, and it came out of a fund paid into by ISPs, and the amount paid would be proportional to how many sites the Internet users of the world hit that day, and it would have some way of avoiding payment to link farms and other similar garbage content. And this would be an international system, and it would be designed in a way that somehow perfectly preserved privacy while maintaining auditability. I have no idea what that would look like, of course.

In the absence of such a scheme, though, there will always be a tug of war for power between content creators and browser/search companies, because the latter are trying to do what is best for the user in the short term, and the former are trying to get paid to protect what is best for the user in the long term. And I'm really not sure how to solve that problematic power dynamic, except by suggesting that perhaps that tug of war might actually be the solution, because it means neither side has too much power and control.