He was hoping it would work in courts too.

Probably an AI will advise the Board.

how much is the cheapest TV today compared to the 90s

You can't eat your TV. You can't drive your TV to the grocery store. You can't take your TV into the bank and get a home loan, nor can you take your TV to a home seller and get a reasonable price. You can't hand it to the university and be handed back an education. You can't give your doctor your TV and receive surgical or even preventive care or the meds you need.

Your problem (other than the root one of spewing disingenuous nonsense) is that you're looking at the pricing in the electronics sector and pretending it's representative of the extremely high basic living costs I called out (which of course it is not) — nowhere did I say anything about either the pricing of electronics or the need for a TV to achieve a reasonable cost of living. Nor should you have. But here we are.

Bit late for that now, innit?

January 2022: https://abcnews.go.com/US/bitc...
February 2022: https://www.theguardian.com/te...
December 2023: https://www.indystar.com/story...

"Women over 40 have the lowest birth rate" shouldn't come as a shock to anyone

Older does tend to mean wiser, after all. Well... okay, for some people.

Destroying middle class has predictable consequence of tanking birth rate. News at 11.

"We must have constant inflation or people might, you know, save!"

Then... basics cost (a lot) more and mid- to low-tier wages don't even come close to keeping up

Brutal housing, education, medical, food, vehicle, and fuel costs, crushing taxes on the lower tier workers... gee, sounds like a great circumstance to bring some ever-more-expensive rug rats into.

The "American Dream" is deader than Trump's diaper contents for a large swath of those of an age to be pumping out crotch goblins. But hey: The stock market is doing Great!

Or perhaps it's just that no one wants to hump someone with their pants falling off their butt — or otherwise dressing like a refugee.

Obligatory: get off my lawn.

Isn't that illegal in Texas and Florida?

We have others that are considered high-speed rail, so this is NOT America's first.
But, like many others of Biden's wasted $, this is another project that should not be approved and hopefully, Trump (or next president since it will not be biden) will pull the $ from this. Why? Because this is by far the single best route to put in the world's first hyperloop. It is not just ppl that move from LA to LV. There is a ton of cargo that gets sent. Hyperloop needs to be done with cargo FIRST, and ran for 2-4 years before accepting it for manned travel. And having Cargo travel at 300-500 MPH between these, at costs cheaper than trucks, would be a big deal.

For SX to set up a base on the moon and mars, they will need 2 different types of landers: Cargo and Manned.
With manned, it is easy enough for ppl and supplies to be transferred from space-only to the lander. The question becomes, what about the cargo version?
So far, SX has shown a door on the side, but I believe that there is NO WAY that is going to work. The reason is that the cargo will be pulled out and then have to be stacked directly below the door. In addition, assuming that lunar and martian cargo systems never return to earth surface, then we need a way to move cargo from the starship leaving earth to the lander, or possibly something in-between.
With that in mind, about the only system that I can imagine would be to use the nose opening, docking nose to nose, and then having containers, moved from 1 system to the other. Finally, when landed, the nose is opened up again, and a crane on the inside is used to pull the container out and place it on the side. What is interesting is that the crane could be attached to the rocket via a track that runs on the inside so that it can rotate around the lander and drop off containers directly to the ground as opposed to being forced to stack them.

Now, as to starship:
1) trivial for it to reach orbit. It was not because they are not working on orbiting, but on all of the stuff in-between such as take-off, separation, fuel pump testing, re-entry and landing on a single spot.
2) It is highly likely that SX will launch a couple of starlinks sats on this next launch. If not, it will almost certainly be the one after that. IOW, they will start using it for Cargo. 3) Re-fueling in orbit is not a big deal. They tested this in the last launch, internally. In addition, liquid transfers have been done for a long time (water, lox, fuel for ISS and other modules). They will need to build a tanker and a fuel-depot, but tanker will likely happen this year.
4) manned rating for launches will take a number of launches. Of course, that is exactly what SX intends to do with starlink cargos. Even if landings are not working yet, they will continue to use this to put up their starlinks that can not go on F9 ( though possible on FH ). The interesting item is how to test the life support. I suspect that they will be putting up 1 or more of these as space station module. Each 1 has more volume than the entire ISS (and far more than China's space station). Just by putting up the first one as a regular starship, they can sort things out for the ECLSS as well as layout, etc. Ideally, they would build several of these with later ones have multiple docking ports. That would enable these to quickly replace the ISS, while others continue to add their units to these for testing of their modules/ECLSS.

And yes, of this could be done before 2026.
Of course, that leaves the lunar lander. I would have to guess that once SX is able to land booster and starship on earth, they will have no issues landing on either the moon/mars. The only real issue will be (re-)entry into mars. The atmosphere is thin, but it is still there.

Yeah, I don't know where the *good* Sci-Fi authors went either? ... cry me a river. There are way more good SF books than you can shake a stick at let alone read.

Vernor Vinge just died. Read any of his stuff? Very well written classic SF.

The Expanse series.

The Dune books, not just the first one. Given, Dune is a tad overrated in some regards but the good bits are really good and well worth the read. That goes for the entire Dune series.

What about Cyberpunk, somewhat of a sub-genre of SF? Neal Stephenson, read him? If not you've got some catching up to do. ... William Gibson seems to put out a Cyberpunk novel every odd year and the latest stuff is still as premium as ever.

Cory Doctorov, Orsen Scott Card, Richard Morgan, Michael Weisser ...

If you get bored you can look into lore books. The RPG universe of Shadowrun is your type A Nerd fest but of the 80 novels or so they have the top 5-10 are really good and worth a look, even if you don't care about the franchise. I'm pretty sure other expensive IPs have similar traits. It's quite unlikely that the top 5 novels of the Battletech or Warhammer universe are a complete waste of time. The writers of those books tend to spend years working on the worlds before writing a book on them which does lead to consistency and a baseline of quality.

Bottom line: You likely have vast unexplored areas of SF still to discover. Old and new.

If idiots like this actually locked down systems ( offshoring makes it easy to crack these ), OR refused to pay, then these nations/groups would stop. Butâ¦.

Just like nations that trade prisoners or pay for others, makes their citizens easy targets.

Using an expendable cargo version starship, including a small rocket for launching the samples to orbit would be possible. That would also fit in with what SX wants. From there, ESA's return rocket would be able to bring them back. And this could be done in the next couple of years assuming that SX gets Starship done this year.

... only because some piece of software doesn't scale. Given, if you're hosts are clobbered with legit requests and you're still relying on uncashed PHP monoliths to handle the load you're being silly and should be let near a live server setup, but there are plenty of examples of perfectly successful large-scale companies built on PHP. Like Facebook for instance. ... Given, they eventually just built Hack which is basically a binary compiler for an updated PHP dialect, but the old saying goes for PHP just as much as for any other quick time to market web technology: If you have a scaling problem you don't really have a problem. And if somebody didn't know what they were doing in the first place it doesn't matter whether they used PHP or something else. It's likely their shitty design that broke their be app. Or bad management. I'd guess the latter.

As a thin server-side web templating layer API to the vast variety of well established tried and true FOSS C libraries that do the grunt work of most of todays computing needs PHP fits the job perfectly and does get it done pretty good too.

... was cancelled last winter and you could almost wade through the Rhine where I live last summer. Right now we just had 0C (freezing threshold) this morning before sunrise but 8 days ago people were walking around in T-Shirts with 28C outside.

Last year the tourists left the Mediterranean because it was too warm. The actual Mediterranean Sea was to warm, with water temperatures reaching 30C and more. Two years ago in summer you'd have 37C after sundown for days on end.

Not fun and bad news for Southern Europe AFAICT.

In controlled airspace you would be right... but these things are being pitched as suburban/urban commute options operating at low altitude where there's no ATC. That means they have to deal with birds, the GPS-shielding effects of tall buildings, wind tunnels created by the same tall structures and a whole lot more.

The automation of air-transport at 30,000 feet is a whole lot different to transport at a few hundred feet over a busy metropolis and where there may be buildings higher than t he craft itself.