Yes, but after wanting to buy 3-4 things that I liked and being smacked in the face with "nope", I really don't want to settle to the "mini-drone".

Don't you wanna read about "clarificiations"?

Oh, now I understand.

I guess I'm out of luck, then.

Sahara disagrees.
http://www.desertec.org/

Not a perfect solution but a start. There are issues with desert storms and keeping the panels clean (currently done with water, dry cleaning isn't quite there) but if you think about how cars were in the early 1900s... there's hope, to say the least.

We're not talking about billion dollar problems, that's a severe underestimation.
Climate fuck-up and possible extinction (yes, it CAN get there, albeit not in the next few centuries, hopefully) can't be counted in dollars. It's actually reaching an infinite amount in damages.
So yes, if a solution costs trillions, then so be it. Do you think it's a lot? What's the total USA debt?

yes I did.

Japan's easy: Watch their shows; watch their ads; watch their music; watch their products. All, with very few exceptions, are way over the top.
China's really too big to be momolithic in this approach. It's a subcontinent by itself, to the extent that people from the North side don't speak the same language as those from the South, therefore one can't say "Chinese culture" without over-generalizing.
South Korea is gravitating toward extremes as well.

If they're told to.
That's the big difference. A human mind starts constructing a simulation by itself, a computer doesn't, nor do I see it doing so in the foreseeable future.

In which way?
If a computer can make additions, subtractions, multiplications at 0.00001% of the time we're capable of, this doesn't mean they're more powerful. It only means they're more specialized in a very narrow activity. Yes, very narrow, since a human being uses a very tiny fraction of their time performing mathematical calculations.

Humans are way above machines when we're talking about performing various activities one after another without extensive downtimes spent reprogramming themselves.
Here's an example: get up, dance, write a 50-word paragraph about eggs, clap hands, take a shower, hum the national anthem, name 5 random objects presented to you, understand a joke someone's telling you, smell a flower.

The list could go on. Intelligence is not about doing one thing very fast, but about doing many different things well enough. And yes, this includes animal world as well.

It's not about countries, it's about cultures.
Some cultures (e.g. Western European culture) favor more serious subjects versus others. Some others (e.g. Northern American) favor lighter subjects (unwind-type). Asian cultures apparently favor explosive feeling-related and augmentative headlines ("It's SUPER effective!"; "AMAZING performance!").

Nobody's to blame, really, except companies not doing their homeworks and trying to vomit their own culture-specific successes over other cultures and promptly failing.

Romanian here: Well... I'm with you fellas.

Asians would feel offended by your remarks.
They definitely need slit monitors.

My manager never gets involved into the development process except when there's an escalation, usually from me. He's there to help me overcome hurdles, nothing more. And he's been really good at keeping stupid people at bay.

...but when you compare it with the possibility you might not interact at all with someone from, say, Indonesia... it suddenly becomes infinitely richer :)