Your analogy is flawed. The other countries were shooting 'targetted' with a pistol. Trump entered like an elephant in china shop and opened an automatic rifle on anything that moves (or even doesn't). That is starting a war!

As to why there is a trade imbalance. You are only looking at the goods, not services. The US is a major services exporter to at least Europe. And as for goods: just export what we want, not what you think we want. Prime example are cars: most US brands failed big as they didn't sell cars the Europeans want. Food: we have strict laws about food-safety and regulation (hormone-treated beef, chlorine washed chicken) applying to everybody, EU and non-EU producers. I'm not saying there is no protection of our market but in both cases it also come down to not selling what the buyer wants.

I do the same thing; I usually restore from /dev/random. If you restore long enough, at some point you'll get the data you wanted :-)

Did video recorders somehow pass you by?

I live in Belgium and built my own PVR. The biggest problems recording shows over here:

- getting decent program information (no XMLTV service available so you have to use a grabber and the information isn't always accurate)
- most stations decide on the fly to change their schedule/programming because of sport-events and other stuff
- most channels have no notion of starting on time so I have to program the PVR to start recording 5 minutes before the indicated time and record for an extra 10 minutes afterwards.... and still you get shows that aren't recorded completely.

As the original poster said; it's all about convenience. I can watch 1h worth of live TV in 2/3rds of the time when it suits me. I usually get home late from work so it saves me time and allows me to watch when I can.