Wish I had mod points. This has been one of my problems with the whole NSA scandal - it has taken eyes off of the bigger problem. Even as people think of protecting themselves from the various Three Letter Agencies, they forget about the ones that end in ".com".

No, but you do see >90% efficiency as compared to the ~40% at best from combustion engines.

The amount of heat matters. Internal combustion engines are ~40% efficient at absolute best. Electric motors are ~98% efficient.

They're both producing waste heat, but one is producing *a lot* less per mile driven.

Who's wasting it year-round? Why would you turn on the electric car's heat in the summer?

What do you do with that waste heat in the summer?

No need to go to 200 years. Pitch 1945 US armed forces against anything > 30 years prior.

I've run without AdBlock since forever, because hey the guys running the content get money that way, and sometimes the ads are useful, sometimes I click, and sometimes I've even bought... but just this week I encountered an ad by Essilor that just wouldn't shut up, with the useless AdChoices button but without the X to get rid of it. I closed the page, installed Adblock, went back to finish the page. Three days later I am definitely not missing all those ads!

There's a pretty big difference between targetting locations strategically and torturing / killing a prisoner that has already been rendered unable of doing you harm.

If you want to have an apt analogy, I say our treatment of Guantanamo prisoners and other "enemy combatents" that we've so labeled for the sole purpose of not extending them the rights of prisoners of war is the valid one. I agree that behavior is despicable, and it doesn't get enough attention.

Dropping bombs on combatants is absolutely fair game. It's not pretty, I don't like that we have to, but war necessarily involves killing people. Anyone purposefully bombing civilians is not ok (collateral damage is often unavoidable, but we must aim to minimize it). Anyone torturing or killing prisoners, civilians or otherwise, is not ok on either side.

The brand that doesn't lock farmers out will get more business, presuming that there is such a brand, and it makes decent equipment.

Otherwise used equipment will start commanding a better price. Plus new business will emerge in buying too-broken-to-repair farm equipment, and managing to rebuild it with better facilities and spare parts.

One of my more-fun tasks on the farm was going into the weeds to get three dead green-choppers and scabbing the parts to make one that worked.

The fun is that in 2001, the bright side of Iapetus was sculpted, with the monolith in the middle. In reality the dark side is sculpted from passage through the dust ring.

There's a bit more to it than that. My tops would be two points.
First, we're memetically infectuous. Plant a new idea here, and someone will run with it, most likely in some direction you never wished for. Many of our memetic infections are downright dangerous, lethal, destructive, etc. Contact might well be considered irresponsible, no matter how well intended.
Second, there's the thing I mentioned about our reverse-engineering technology. They might accidentally give us more capability than they wanted to. Not that we'd be any threat to them, but we've been sitting here for however long with the Doomsday Clock close to midnight. Give us something new that can be weaponized, (We've been able to turn just about everything into a weapon, perhaps the most resistant invention was the "death ray", the laser - it's had so darned many peaceful uses and has been very hard to make into aweapon.) and we will do so. Perhaps that weapon might be what tips the scale, ticks the clock, or whatever metaphor you like.