If you live in the developed world you have the latter, outside of the rare pathological case like Flint, MI. You just refuse to use it, and instead prefer drinking water from plastic bottles that have been shipped from motherfucking Fiji, an environmental travesty ignored by Green Peace, who love their bullshit Fiji water.

As for the former, not everybody can live where everybody wants to live. Housing is plenty affordable. Unaffordable housing is a uniquely coastal problem caused by humans trying to be herd animals and all jam themselves into the same space, and there's no cure for that. Apps can maybe change attitudes but probably not that one. There's no cure for stupid, and insisting on living where there are already millions of people and not enough water to go around is just plain stupid. Live somewhere else, dickheads, and the housing and water problems solve themselves.

Are you hungry? Cold? Wet? Did you get a full night's sleep last night? Can you take a hot shower any time you like?

Can 330 million of your neighbors do the same?

Yes?

Then shut the fuck up.

Humanity is the richest, most comfortable, most well off we have ever been in our existence as a species. ALL of us. No exceptions. Even America's homeless have nylon tents which used to cost two weeks of salary. Our biggest problems now are being too fat from having too much food, having too many recreational drugs, and being so comfortable that we're not having children. Ask any hominid from the last 3 million years if they'd prefer to be in your place and they would say yes.

The fuck out of here with your catastrophizing moaning and groaning. You're so rich you can sit in air conditioned comfort and bitch on the Internet (the Internet! a global communication infrastructure that lets you communicate to anyone in the world for a marginal cost of $0.00) about how bad off we all are.

Tesla made that software change a couple of years ago. Their vehicles also now periodically use the mechanical brakes on purpose.

Well insulated houses are in short supply in the United States. Brick laying is a skilled trade and bricks themselves got very expensive. Most of the US home inventory built subsequent to 1970 is stick built with 4" stud walls and attic insulation is hit or miss throughout the southern states. Home builders raced to the bottom generations ago and stayed there as price pressures started ramping up and never let up.

More of the consequences of wage stagnation.

The vast majority of the world was not enslaved for the past 15,000 years. Population density wasn't high enough for that kind of politics and economics to emerge. The big dirty secret of economics is hunter/gatherer tribes operate on gift economies up to quite large scales of multiple thousands of people, much larger than the family unit scale economists have insisted is the limit for generations. Potlatch in North America was very large before the Europeans came.

But once city-states supported by agriculture emerge, all bets are off. Don't blame me. I'm just describing the history of that part of the world.

On the contrary, there's a significant shortage of bait. Haven't you heard? Birth rates have dropped below replacement rate throughout the developed world.

Won't work. Russia has been led by a strong man since Ivan the Great in the late 1400s. They like it that way and won't tolerate anything else.

You don't think not leaving the house for months might have had something to do with it?

I'm going to suggest that accounts for pretty much all of the uptick. People went from sedentary to positively sessile.

What color is the sky in your world? It must be a fascinating place.

Meanwhile in the real world Donald Trump will never hold office again.

Quite the opposite. They're both taking a terrible risk, daring to say such things out loud. Rich Chinese people have disappeared for months after saying things like that, and if they come back at all, they talk very very differently. Think 1984 differently.

It's a crazy idea.

"Natural" batteries. Wtf "natural" batteries? Ancient peoples didn't use electricity. If by "natural battery" you mean "store of energy", yes, they burned a lot of wood. We can't do that anymore.

As for "less toxic" agriculture, in case you hadn't noticed, there are more than 8 billion of us now. Ancient agriculture couldn't feed 8 billion. Are you volunteering to starve to death? No? Then shut up about modern agriculture. If you're so ignorant as to advocate for the death of billions, you shouldn't open your mouth at all.

Smarter people than you have thought really hard. We will need batteries to handle generating power without burning fuels. We will have to continue to build infrastructure to generate said power. Building said infrastructure requires "consuming finite resources" by the definition of most environmental nutbags like yourself who take the short view of a piddly few thousand years.

Of course nothing is consumed as long as it's still on Earth. Matter can be neither created nor destroyed by conventional industries. It's all still here. At our current rate of "consumption" (really transformation), for most things we'll have to start reprocessing waste in a few hundred thousand years. We'll probably start sooner, but not because we have to.

No, we are not going to give up electricity. You know what electricity did for us? It eliminated slavery. If you don't understand that, you're as ignorant of history as you are of the present day. Stop trying to interpret the world through feeelings. It leads to horrific policies.

Technically true. It has happened exactly once, in February this year, in China.

The downfall of sodium-ion batteries since the '70s has been their very poor longevity. Even today, the best they can do is 900 charge cycles before their capacity craters. Lithium-ion tolerates 3500 cycles today, and can be coaxed to last much longer with careful charge management. That same careful charge management is required to achieve 900 cycles with sodium-ion too. If you pursue 0 to 100% it's much worse.

Sodium-ion batteries also use all of the same materials as lithium-ion, despite best efforts to the contrary. That includes manganese, magnesium, and nickel. Efforts have been made involving titanium-bearing cathodes, which are interesting lab curiosities but ridiculously expensive in bulk.

Development of sodium-ion batteries is 20 years behind lithium-ion. They enjoyed research attention through the '80s but that tailed off to essentially nothing in the '90s. Research didn't pick up again until the 2010s, so finding reasonable cathodes, anodes, and electrolytes are all behind where lithium-ion now is. It's going to take just as much experimentation and failure to advance sodium-ion even as far as lithium-ion.

Personally I don't like either sodium-ion or lithium-ion for stationary service in homes, because they just don't last long enough. Home appliances should have 30+ year lifespans and that includes battery piles. I'd prefer nickel-iron batteries if their own shortcomings could be worked out. (They have a nasty tendency to develop a lot of hydrogen gas at the slightest provocation.) Nickel-iron batteries have the proven longevity to be suitable for consideration as a lifetime battery, with original Edison cells still in operation today, running at 50% of their rated capacity 100 years after they were manufactured. Unfortunately mobile applications have dominated battery research for decades so nickel-iron has been ignored. Their energy density is low enough they've been dismissed out of hand, but that's not an issue for stationary applications (within reason, which they meet).

Of course the other problem with nickel-iron is they last too long. Commercial companies like products which last just long enough for the customer to feel satisfied and not a minute longer, so they have to come buy a new one and are willing to do so. This is why we can't have nice things.

You must not use Twitter. Twitter users routinely behave in ways that make third graders say, "wtf?" It was actively encouraged by the previous Twitter administration because it "improved engagement".

For that matter, you must not have any contact with college-age kids either. College kids have been indulging in purity tests that would make Brown Shirts blush for the past seven or eight years.

There's a certain very small but very vocal minority who pursue race-baiting with religious fervor. Be grateful your media diet does expose you to them. Every time I brush up against the fringe of them I have to spend days training the algorithms to leave me alone.

She was under 18, not an emancipated minor, and not the subject of a custody settlement. The law does not recognize any ability on her part to consent to leave her parents' house, regardless of what she actually wanted.

And for good reason. Guys like him have a fetish for a particular age, which teenage girls very quickly grow out of. He'd have turned her out eventually, with no money, an interrupted education, no skills other that prostitution, and very likely a newly acquired drug habit.

High school sucks, but there are worse things.

How have they not been C&Ded into oblivion by Microsoft already? This new Microsoft that isn't viciously enforcing their IP rights is too strange...