Way too many variables to say. Depends upon the major and the school.

In my school, for science/engineering majors, physics sucked. Something like 35 was passing. Out of 100. A lot of people still didn't pass. I had a lot of foreign professors, and physics was one of two or three that I had trouble understanding. But, that was ok, but because he pretty much just wrote on the board the whole time and people just copied off the board. It was one of the few classes where I felt I was learning without help, other than the classmates I studied with. I had a friend who took a different computer science focus purely because of physics-even though his goal was the type of job from that focus.

I've heard that Calculus is a big one for a lot of people. People often take it when they are freshmen. It's required for a lot of majors. Maybe some schools try to make it more difficult because they want freshmen to have a difficult class. I don't say that as a bad thing. Difficult classes push people to learn more, and to expand the limits of what they are capable of. If a freshman can't handle studying hard, it's better to learn that in the first year than the third year.

A lot of states have "trades" with other states for in state tuition, too. Still not losing anything, and not relevant to foreign students.

There used to be(is?) something called a paper bag test. If you're darker than the bag, you're black. I think this test got used by blacks and whites, but I definitely heard it told about being used at black parties, on light skinned blacks, to see if someone could come in.

Yes, racism is bad. I don't think many people care about fictional characters being treated in racist ways.

The question is about modelling racism and presenting that modelling as acceptable or "just the way things are"(statistics give inherent bonuses).

Comparisons of traits of orcs to stereotypes of black people:
obvious, orcs are green-black people are brown/black
orcs are savages/from a tribal culture-black people are stereotyped as savages
orcs are strong-black people are often stereotyped as strong/athletic
orcs are stupid-black people are stereotyped as stupid
orcs are lazy-black people are lazy
orcs are evil-racists almost by definition think black people are inherently "lesser", though not evil

Orc traits have been updated to be "usually" lately, but that's like a racist saying "some black people are ok, but black people are usually..." AKA "I have a black friend".

I'd like to see comparisons with other races. I've often wondered if "greedy gnomes with big noses" were supposed to be analogues for Jews. I don't know enough about gnomes in D&D to compare.

All that said, games take place in fictional universes. Orcs and humans are not the same species. They can interbreed, but the progeny might have a lower likelihood of survival-that's why donkeys and horses are different species. I think it is a good question to ask: What would existence be like if Earth had multiple intelligent species. I find a complicated answer to this more interesting.

I generally agree. Black and white morality tends to be less interesting. This is a more recent trend in thought, though. Think Beowulf and most classics. There are great current works with "just evil" characters, like Zykon from Order of the Stick. Hilarious, but even his origin story was designed to keep him "just evil" and not sympathetic.

Another great example of a "just evil" character was Darth Vader. He was "just evil" until right before he died. We didn't have much time to see him as a complex character. He's one of the best villains of all time. Anakin Skywalker, much less interesting.

While I might see more value in religions than you, I want to expand on your first point.

Fear of punishment is the first level of moral development(Kohlberg developed the idea). There are 6 or 7 further stages. Including "being a good boy/girl", following the rules/law, Social contract are more advanced levels.

I'm not a Christian, and haven't heard of a theory similar to this. But I would say there are at least two levels of Christian moral development. The first would be fear of punishment. Another would be where one is "truly affected by God's love, and acts accordingly". Since it is acting in accordance with love, it might be in the "post-conventional" stages of moral development.

I occasionally wear a mask in the car. Just because it's a short drive and it's easier to just deal with the mask now while I have it in my hand than when I get somewhere and might forget it.

I don't wear it outside. I went hiking this weekend. When I drove to the place, no mask. I don't remember if I wore a mask when we went to eat at a restaurant(outside). I didn't wear it when we were sitting.

I've worked in a couple of high schools recently. The only daycare I've seen was for teaching the kids how to take care of kids(whatever they currently call Home Economics).

The change to below replacement levels happened approximately at the Civil War. This is also about the time the US got industrialized. Countries that get industrialized also have their birth rates drop significantly. I've tended to think the birth rate drops because children cost parents money in an industrialized economy(education, food, clothes, etc), while in an agricultural economy children make parents money(working the fields, milking the cows, etc). There are outliers with this trend, and my grandmother had 9 kids. She was Catholic, though...

As a former programmer who has written AI, it is happening. There is a LOT of it already. AI isn't just superintelligent robots that can do everything a human can do and more. This is usually referred to as strong AI(sometimes true AI). AI has a lot of uses in specialized programs. I wrote a basic AI program for hand recognition. The most recent major new use I read about is in legal filings. It has been used in games for a long time.

Haven't read A Scanner Darkly yet. VALIS is probably the weirdest thing I've ever read. Very "What's really real?". The main character is Horselover Fat, which is a Anglicization of Philip Dick from Greek. It's got confusion between the narrator and the author in the book. It's semi-autobiographical(YES, it's in the SF section). That's not all the weird stuff going on in it.

It's basically paying $44.50 for half a seat. That pretty cheap. You'd likely get that half a seat anyway now, but this is a guarantee.

I feel the need to point out that Thor was once an alien kangaroo.

People in Taiwan(and China, I presume) get takeout or eat out a LOT. Restaurants are a LOT cheaper there.

My company doesn't provide most of those. The provide the computer, but that's pretty much it. But, a computer would be provided for that job in the office, anyway.

But, the extra money I pay for decent bandwidth is less than the money I save by not commuting.

The maintenance costs are negligible, which is why my company has been going increasingly remote for a while.