Jelly? WTF?

Whiskey.
Let's get adult here.

It certainly won't knock 'humanity off the face of the earth' but it could well cause significant population and natural resource competition.

Guess what two of the most common reasons for human warfare are?

Heroine's are OK under the proper circumstances but they tend to be all bossy and in charge of things, after all, they are the heroes.

You just did.

Is this a trick question? Something from Common Core?

Was I left behind as a child?

BIG rotors made of aerogel.

But I agree, what NASA needs is God's Little Toy from Pattern Recognition (W. Gibson, I think it's that book).

Basically a blimp with a camera. It could even be tethered.

Come on. You're blaming people not being able to handle qualitative and quantitative explosions in information (if not knowledge) on the family (or lack thereof)? Yes, family is important. No, family is not (and historically has not been) the general arbiter or source of most information. You're confusing family with society, especially pre literate society.

How in bog's green earth is any sort of family unit supposed to deal with the current knowledge set? Hell, even a university level professor can barely keep track of what goes on in their own field.

I think you're conflating a series of basic homilies and perhaps moral constructs (as useful and as important as they are) with knowledge. They are different concepts.

Trained observers are almost always useful to have around. We pay the government enough to keep that resource available, might as well use it.

In fact, given the large number of drivers who have difficulty differentiating between the front and the back of the vehicle, any automated system more advanced than a Radio Shack TRS-80 would be a significant improvement.

This is a pretty low bar we are dealing with here.

No, at least in the US a driver of an emergency vehicle has more of an onus on them to avoid accidents. They are the professional and you are the idiot. There have been numerous cases of emergency vehicle drives cited / sued for their behavior. Which is why you are finding that more and more emergency vehicles are driving fairly sedately - we've found that screaming around corners in large, lumbering vehicles to save 0.7 seconds on a call doesn't add up to anything but increased insurance costs. Slow down and you get there faster. It's something we're really stressing with the volunteer fire department drivers. We have even pulled the little blue lights that the volunteers had. It's safer if they just drive normally and get there a couple of seconds later.

An emergency vehicle running with lights and sirens has the right-of-way but that does not give them carte blanche.

You don't have a right to be able to afford anything. At least in any society beyond pure communism - which has never existed in groups of more than say, 100.

It would be a nice societal benefit to allow persons without much economic means to freely travel - but nothing on the order of a mandate. Now, most societies agree that people should be allowed to travel freely without undo government interference but there is nothing that says somebody else has to pay for it or allow an individual to put others at risk for economic or any other reason.

Man, does that hurt. I'm afraid you're right to a very large extent. I could certainly upgrade from a 42" 1080 p screen, but unless I sit really close with my glasses on, it doesn't make much difference.

The nieces and nephews think the TV is something akin to a slide rule - an interesting historical object of little daily import. If it doesn't go on the laptop screen or the phone, it doesn't get watched.

Except for the Star Wars laser disks but that's another sad tech story.....

Piss your wife off too many times and you won't have to worry about your electronics shortening anything.

All you need to do is to be rich and gullible.

Yeah, and don't tell me you're using an Apple one-button mouse and that I'm an insensitive clod.