The blindness, however, will last only until they begin to see the increase in advertising spam they receive, based on the new monetization of their personal information.

All of the tik-tokkers rushing there to "try this one weird trick to lose weight and reverse diabetes"...

Because the 'agreement" dealt only with fossil fuel used for energy, it lets the 70,000+ atttendees of COP28 get back in their private aircraft and fly home, self-righteously secure that they've done all they could to protect the planet from the debbil greenhouse gas CO2...

/earth is 97% full. Please delete anyone you can.
-- Unix fortune file, 1985

And something that I've noticed with several of the 'unskippable mid-video ad' insertions is that the video being interrupted seems to continue playing invisibly behind the ad, so that when the ad finishes and returns you to the video you want to watch, you've missed part of the video and have to back up to catch what YouTube so helpfully skipped for you.

Invalid comparison. What is the efficiency of an EV from the point where the electricity is being generated to the power delivered to the road? 66% of the primary energy used to create electricity is wasted by the time it arrives at the customer. So your 89% efficiency is on 34% of the energy, dropping the overall efficiency to ~30%. Diesel engines may have only a 50% thermal efficiency, but that's based on 100% of the energy in their fuel.

Not to mention the backup infrastructure to provide power when the 'clean green renewable' generation isn't; all of the "renewable energy is cheaper than fossil fuels" rhetoric still doesn't account for the cost of providing 24/7/365 dispatchable power in the face of night-time, overcasts, a week or more of calm, and other conditions that tank renewable production.

If you're lucky; the couple in Wales who discovered after driving their Tesla in heavy rain that water ingress to the battery was not covered under the battery's warranty and were facing a £17,000 repair bill after waiting five hours for a Tesla Roadside Assistance to arrive when their car failed to start after they'd stopped for food have discovered otherwise to their chagrin. A repair bill a quarter the price of their car new is not something that you normally expect to face.

The immediate issue I see is making sure that the street lights from different communities are all flashing at a synchronized rate; having communities fall out of synch would shrink or even close off the 'dark window' that the telescopes needed -- and it would be almost impossible to tell which communities were failing to synch with the telescope shutters.

Are your breathing tax payments current, citizen? We're here to examine your mask to ensure that none of your exhalations escape without being measured, so you can be taxed appropriately to your CO2 production.

The problem is at least partially due to the way that "renewable energy" has been fixated on wind and solar generation, and now it will save the world, without a trace of consideration for the fact that neither of these can be dispatchable, and with the same availability that nuclear and fossil-fuel generation have, without battery storage that would be orders of magnitude more expensive than the wind and solar generation facilities -- but the 'green' pravda is that both wind and solar have become cheaper than fossil fuel, yet has nothing to say about how cheap it is during calm weather, overcast, and night, all of which tank wind and/or solar production. We can't expect to deliver to continuous demand with intermittent supply, and the baseless NIMBYism that keeps reliable nuclear generation from being built without cost-prohibitive legal battles just makes the goal more unobtainable.

"Moral" = arbitrary ruleset imposed by authority.

"Ethical" = system informed by logic.

I can imagine the thinly-concealed entertainment behind Varda being able to write a condolence note to the FAA like "Pursuant to your denial of re-entry permission, Varda filed a quitclaim on the capsule and shut down all of its systems, resulting in its uncontrolled re-entry as its orbit decayed naturally. We are sorry that the capsule struck FAA headquarters during its re-entry, but as the agency had denied re-entry permission, we were legally unable to redirect the vehicle to re-enter at a location of our choice and using the deceleration systems built into the capsule to allow its payload to be recovered. Varda will not be participating in the bidding for the contract to rebuild FAA headquarters, out of concern that it may be seen as a conflict of interest."

The other consideration is that, in the event of the bodies actually being aliens, DNA testing may not provide any information if their biochemistry doesn't use DNA as genetic material.

Clickbait title: "Microsoft Hates it When You Use This One Weird Trick to Improve File Explorer Performance"