The UK seems terrible at this whole "free society" thing.

It is my understanding that land use (eg cutting down rain forest, draining wetlands) for pasture and soy are a big contributor to the carbon footprint of meat.

Do you know if the mechanical position of the switch guarantees its electronic state without any possibility for hardware malfunction? If no, then you are claiming a person made one of the most grave acts of inhumanity ever.

This sounds to me like an electronics issue - an intermittent, inadvertent state transition likely due to some PCB component malfunction

Well the age assurance is only for logged-in users, so they can just log out.

Why are we buying further into the US closed garden? Why pay and then ask for permission from "daddy" before we can use our own toys?

> Pakistan is not economically strong enough to participate in a war, and India is not interested

Proxy war between U.S. and China. We’re moving the naval assets that were bombing the Houthis. India seizing Pakistan-administered Kashmir cuts Islamabad off from China.

$750B for defense was 3% of the federal budget in 2024. USA plans to shrink defense budget by 40%, to less than 2%, while asking other NATO members to increase their budgets to 5%.

China plans to spend 7.2% of their budget on defense in 2025.

Russia plans to spend 32.5% of their budget on defense in 2025.

I genuinely wish there was an understandable endgame for the USA. The USA seems to be throwing its weight around but I’m not entirely sure to what end. This headline/article is just one area where the US is behaving perplexingly.

I understand that Trump wants Zelenskyy to sign the minerals deal and that implicitly there’s security guarantees. Fine there’s at least a through line. However; by demonstrating that the US is willing to revoke access to this war material during an active shooting war over some ego thing they’re showing allies who’ve invested in the US military equipment that they’re vulnerable to suffer this same fate. Now Europe is turning hard away from US tech.

To some degree this is a good thing, I think, from USA’s POV. Trump has said it’s unfair USA spends the most on NATO and that member states should pay more (how many don’t hit the 2% target). However; the point was to spend their 2% GDP on American armaments. Now Europe is taking their demand and money and investing in domestic military equipment. Which will inevitably beg the question in the coming years if NATO, a US establishment, is to be made redundant?

This US administration can’t seem to have their cake and eat it too. They want money, demand for their goods, but every time they act out they drive away their business partners.