I have a Moto Razr Maxx HD, now working on its 3rd year. It's been basically perfect. I reboot it perhaps once every few months, and half of those reboots are due to an OTA OS upgrade.

With it's amazing battery life, and durable, sturdy case, it's a phone that feels like a "partner" that doesn't leave me hanging and even when I'm really putting the screws to it, (EG: on trips) it's "just there" for me.

It is no longer a "flagship" phone, it's not the fastest phone, and it doesn't have the biggest/brightest screen any more, but it's still a very, very good balance for a phone that I probably won't be replacing until it actually dies.

My only honest complaint is that its bluetooth reception seems weak. I use $20 wired headphones as a result.

It got stuck and needed a reboot two or maybe three years ago and has been rock solid since. Still nothing viable to replace it without having to use two separate devices.

Can you imagine millennial parents giving their precious offspring pocket knives?

I was about to reply that I've seen a few young kids with pocket knives but their parents grew up in places like China and have associated more with older generations in the west than people of their own age.

I had my own .22 rifle by the time I was 10.

Maybe if we had more of that now people would see the things properly as tools instead of the NRA insanity of it being an external sign of manhood, patriotism and being ready to overthrow the USA in a minute.

From mucking about with it professionally (foundry sand packing test - pump mercury under a little bit of pressure through a sand sample) and reading a lot about mercury safety at the time it's the fumes that are the problem. Don't breath in mercury fumes and you'll be as fine as the gold miners working outdoors that used to stick their hands in the stuff and far better off than the hatters indoors that were poisoned by the fumes from heating the stuff up.
Washing it down the drain to where it can end up in small organisms then concentrated into top level predators that people eat is also very bad news.

Only if you do something as insane in hindsight as put lead acetate in the wine as a cheap sweetener. Lead pipes give you tiny trace amounts. Guzzling down cheap vino with a lead based sweetener like the Romans did is a few orders of magnitude more.
The lead pipes myth came from someone who knew about the poisoning but not about the wine so made a bit of a guess - lucky for us a wrong one since there's still some lead plumbing around.

Most of the stuff you highlight can be handled by a feature phone, though, except reading books. I use my 6-year-old Android, doesn't seem to crash or need to reboot unless the battery is on empty (and shocking the battery still works pretty well after 6 years - will go 12+ hours between charges). You don't need anything fancy - what you want is something stable.

I'm really struggling with what to get next - the screen on my phone has been cracked for a couple of years now, so I should probably replace it one of these days. But now it's all these damn giant phones that don't fit in my pockets, don't have replaceable batteries - what ever happened to cell phones getting smaller?

If you have that problem often enough to care, you need better friends, not a better phone!

It's a marginal cost. Reducing the number of people can reach a regime where there is a positive value to people once again.

Inflation was cooked up to explain most of that after the fact, though, so it's unsurprising that it does. The fundamental problem with inflation is that too much is tunable. Penrose's cyclic cosmology explains all the same stuff, and at least has the decency to make some bizarre (and very likely false) predictions outside of the early universe.

Theories of the very early universe that require new fields that there's a way to detect today are interesting. Certainly there are ideas to explain dark energy as an extension of inflation that fit that bill. But theories that propose a bunch of cool new physics that all conveniently vanished early on are a bit sketchy, at least until we can somehow make an equivalent of WMAP for the neutrino background radiation, and observe the very early universe directly. I hope I live to see that!

Trying to avoid punishment is an example of a "moral, principled basis".

That doesn't help in the least. It doesn't matter how you travel: two events, separated in space, that happen "at the same time" in my frame of reference don't do so in another. If I depart A and arrive at B "instantly" in some reference frame, then I have travelled backwards in time from another. There's no getting around that: we live in a relativistic universe.

You seem to think the QM guys cooked up this really weird story while particularly high one night, then went looking for a way to make it fit the universe. It's the observations themselves that bring the weirdness. Sure, the universe at these scales far from human experience doesn't fit with our intuitions, but that shouldn't surprise, as our intuitions are based entirely on human experience. Sure the math is intricate, far from simple or elegant, but there's no actual reason to believe the universe is simple and elegant, other than it would be nice if it were so.

Is this all some complex expression of some simpler, underlying truth that we just haven't found yet? Certainly everyone working in the field hopes so! But the horrible, crufty Standard Model just keeps making accurate predictions, and all the clever ideas of physicists to create a simpler underlying model that could explain everything we measure keep failing to do so.

It seems like you're missing a key concept here: "simultaneous" depends on reference frame. If two events separated in space, A and B, happen at the same time in my reference frame, there's a reference frame in which A happens before B, and a reference frame in which B happens before A. There's no one true order of events.

This causes no paradoxes in relativity, precisely because you can't send information, or cause an action, faster than the speed of light. The propagation delay between A and B ensures cause precedes effect in every reference frame, and the order of events can't quite shift enough to overcome that propagation delay.

But moving FTL breaks all that. If I move "instantly" in my reference frame, then there's a frame in which I move back in time, and a frame in which I jump forward in time. I don't move back in time in my own reference frame, sure, but I really do in another. And if you're moving quickly relative to me, I can use that to relay a message from you to your past self - either by a series of accelerations between the frames, or by using a friend in your reference frame who can teleport as well.

If I want to visit my own past self, I would need to teleport some significant distance, accelerate up to relativistic speed, again teleport a significant distance, then accelerate again to match location and speed with my former self - elaborate, but possible. Or, if I could travel a great distance, say 1 billion light years, "instantly", then I don't need much acceleration at all, just the difference in velocity the Earth achieves in 6 months as it makes half an orbit would do it.

I can't do sums while jet lagged clearly.

$6500 is less than a decent UPS for a server rack. At least a brand name one anyway.

Or about 6.66 Watts in correct units