The gun nuts are the ones supporting the secret police.

Whilst you're 100% correct that gun nuts are melts living in a fantasy world who would piss themselves if anyone broke into their house rather than carrying out their heroic gun fantasies, I think the GPP was referring to a breakdown in society where people get territorial and violent. Society is, as they say only three meals away from anarchy. In anarchy all bets are off.

Erm... the US is becoming a Soviet state?

Well you are aligned with Russia now.

For the uninitiated, and the reason no-one actually uses "second world" any more is because it originally meant what side of the cold war you were on. The planet was divided into three separate "worlds", the first world being US, NATO and allies, the second world being the Soviet Union and countries aligned with them, the third world was unaligned countries. As time went on and the fact most developed countries were aligned with NATO and most unaligned countries were developing or undeveloped it became shorthand for rich and poor countries and with the collapse of the Soviet Union the second world ceased to exist.

So technically speaking, the Philippines is a first world country whilst Switzerland is a third world country (the former being staunch US allies and the second being staunchly neutral).

I'm no grammar NAZI so you can use first and third world to refer to economic development but "second" world is categorically wrong as it never developed a new meaning, it ceased to exist 30 years ago. If you would like to differentiate between poor and dirt poor countries economically, might I suggest using the terms "developing" and "undeveloped" respectively as that's what you'd put on a report you'd make to someone like the UN security council.

All spelling and grammatical errors contained in this post are intentional, grammar nazis need entertainment.

You misspelled "privacy".

This just "virtue signalling" for those with absolutely no virtues. Equal and opposite, instead of standing up for good causes they're letting everyone know they only support bad ones, I guess we can call it vice signalling but that still sounds too kind as most people with vices are generally still nice and well rounded, sin signalling then... Being British and Australian I'm going with "cunt signalling" as that's what they're trying to tell us they are and who they're trying to appeal to, however that's not really a BBC Two word.

That really isn't true as certain airlines (Singapore, QANTAS, Emirates, Qatar, et al.) are still flying them as they fill a niche that no other airliner in production can. They're very good at transporting large numbers of people from hub to hub over long distances, London to Singapore for example. Singapore airlines runs 6 flights a day between LHR and SIN (and another two out of LGW) and half of those are A380s, the A350s they fly to and from Gatwick have half the capacity of the A380, the A350 in the long haul configuration holds 253 pax, the A380 holds 471, 343 in Economy alone... And I'm using Singapore as an example because they're the most spacious of the carriers, Qatar operates A380s with 460 economy class seats (and another 46 in higher classes).

This is not to mention the flagship suite products this airliner hosts.

The B747 is dead, the 8i never took off and it looks like the next generation 777 is dead in the water too. So airlines running the A380 are interested in keeping it running.

I took "sophisticated" to mean "needlessly complex" and it's deliberately kept so to keep out competition. Such complexity is also why it's primitive in comparison to all other developed economies and many developing ones.

Also, isn't "facilitating interstate trade" the purview of the US federal government? If so, they seem completely unwilling to do anything.

Complexity is the problem with the US banking system, it's being deliberately kept that way to keep outsiders out. There aren't any US based challenger banks and the big bois have been killing off the old local banks and building societies.

The US government isn't powerless, but gormless to stop it and do what other countries have done and create a seamless system for interbank transfers. They're quite happy to turn a blind eye to it to keep the donations from the big banks coming through.

I can send money between Australia and the UK or even to someone with no bank account in Colombia easier than Americans can send money to each other.

Conversely, if a Mac costs you 1 hour per week because it doesn't do something you need it to it costs $5200 in productivity and the cost of the Mac.

And it does cost in productivity as one of my illustrious duties has been to maintain a Windows Server RDS farm solely for Mac users to be able to log on and use the same applications as everyone else in the business. So not only was it lost productivity, it also cost my time (which is worth more than theirs, I get billed at £180 per hour) and a Windows RDS license. All this because the special little sales people didn't want to use a Dell like everyone else.

Apple, the product that keeps on costing.

Yep, this is blatant protectionism, which is the 'Murican way. This is why Japanese diesel pickups have been banned using a variety of increasingly complex and convoluted rules designed to not prevent US pickups from being banned under the same rule. This is done because the Toyota Hilux would decimate Ford F-series sales, not just immediately but over the long term because you don't have to replace a Toyota Hilux every year as they don't fall apart.

National security is the sledgehammer approach. They're not even bothering with convoluted rules so they can pretend it's not blatant protectionism.

If anything, the data of American drivers is safer in Sweden as they're subject to EU laws like GDPR. I'm certain Ford, GM and Tesla are selling that data to all and sundry.

GTA V, out of the box on PC came on 6 (possibly 7, I can't remember and can't be arsed to check) DVDs and took ages to install. I only bought the physical disks because at the time I lived in Australia and it would have taken even longer to download.

Yep, we do need to address the disinformation crisis before we become as bad as the US where people blindly believe the most obvious of lies from Fox, Trump, et al. However this isn't really the way to go about it.

I'm not concerned about the current government, I'm more concerned if someone authoritarian like Farage gets in, laws like this are tailor made to be abused by people like him.

Oh goodie... another person who thinks their credit card is "free".

Clue by four, it's not, you are paying for it but you just don't know it (and will refuse to accept that fact even after learning it).

First things first, when you use your card the merchant has to pay a percentage of that transaction in fees to the banks and payment processors, the EU capped this at 1%, it can easily exceed 5% outside the EU and routinely goes to 3%. 3 cents out of every dollar goes to paying for your card, at least. It's not free and the banks and payment processors are making serious money off it. There are a minimum of 5 parties for every card transaction You -> Your bank -> Payment processor -> Merchant bank -> Merchant. Every middleman is taking a cut for themselves.

You can argue that banning credit card fees is bad because it forces merchants to hide the cost from the consumer (which is how the banks and payment processors like it) but the EU at least capped the fees and this move would further reduce the burden on both merchants and consumers.

Payment processors like Visa, Mastercard and Amex don't want digital currencies for the same reason they're trying to kill cash. They don't get a cut of that transaction and that's wrong to them.

Yes, train your drivers better and have laws that take the bad ones off the road.

That's why the US has a road fatality rate of 14 per 100,000 pop and the UK has 2.6 per 100,000 pop. Your western countries average around 5 per 100,000 pop (Canada is 4.7, Australia 4.5, France 4.9, Germany 3.3) and we're only really beaten by the Nordic nations who are insanely safe. Before you whine, the per mile statistics aren't any better and the only reason the US drives more is because you won't walk to the shops.

So this means not only having standards for getting a license, also a standard for keeping one. This means punishing DUI, distracted driving (read: morons on the phone), et al.

Automated cars won't fix the problem with the US because the problem isn't technological, it's social. Americans feel entitled to drive the way they do, which is dangerously. In Europe, they aren't any better than human drivers, in many cases they're worse.

The big problem is it's easy to make a device that looks for open WIFI networks in order to connect to the mothership. This is made even easier by the fact that a lot of modern WiFi routers allow for WPS, which often lets you connect without having to enter a password. Sure you can disable it on your side... but what about your neighbours.

Short term solution is not to buy devices that have Wifi built in (I'm looking for a new washing machine and it looks like I'm limited to the cheap models), long term solution requires legislation by a large number of countries (erm... this pretty much means it has to be started by the EU, then adopted by everyone else) but much like GDPR they'll fight it every step of the way.

So that means Tiktok is 150% AI slop... Yes the maths was done by AI on that one.