You're wrong about potatoes. They *are* high in starch, but they aren't "nearly all" starch, like corn or wheat.

Yes, it's got a long way to go. Unfortunately, at least SOME of the changes are (currently) on an exponential growth curve, and people have very poor ability to project those. (And also at some point "limiting factors" will manifest, which aren't significant during the early part of the rise.)

There are quite plausible scenarios where we are still in the early part of the exponential growth curve. Nobody can prove whether this speculation is true or false, but we should be prepared in case it is true.

That kind of thing is something that centrally controlled economies are prone to. It's the mirror image is the problems experienced during the "Great Leap Forward". Market driven economies have different problems (monopolies, concentration of power in the hands of the greedy, etc.) . I'm not really sure which is inherently more deleterious. Perhaps it depends on details of implementation.

It's almost certainly "too late", but I wouldn't say that it's "too little", as I don't think it's even the right move. The announced goal, however (move manufacturing back to the US) is correct. OTOH, sabotaging world trade is a really bad move.

Yes, but the projections I've seen give them several years before their chips catch up (to TSMC). So the question is "Is this a worthwhile move *this* year?". Clearly they should consider the US an unreliable supplier, however.

Unfortunately, the data isn't consistent. That's why they need to make corrections. The question is "Do the corrections make it more nearly accurate?", and that's really hard to demonstrate. When there's too much noise in the signal, it's really difficult to filter it out without losing the signal.

"diesel engines are known for being especially difficult to start in cold."

When I was in the Army in Korea in 1985/86 one of the duties on the duty roster was to start every vehicle in the motor pool every 4 hours and run it for half an hour to keep it warm. Nothing like getting up at 0200 on a Sunday morning to spend an hour in the motor pool.

I have a Polestar 2... about 4500lbs. My first factory set of tires lasted 30K miles, but got replaced because I got a lag bolt through one of the tires AND the rim right at actually 32K miles, and since it was about to go into winter in the Midwest I felt it safest to have matched wear across all four tires.

I now have over 70K miles on my car and while I'm looking at the tires thinking it might be time soon for some new tires it's more because again it's about to go into winter in the Midwest and I prefer to have good rubber when the snow falls. All-season performance tires, I do NOT drive like a granny and I have the performance software upgrade so I do occasionally enjoy doing the 4 second 0-60 launches for fun.

The weight difference issue is also super overblown. Note that while my car is around 4500lbs, a directly competing car at the same time with similar performance and overall practicality was the Audi RS5 Sportback (2022 model year) which has a listed weight of 4000lbs. So there's a 500lb difference but it's important too to note that car weights are listed as empty weights. 15 gallons of fuel weighs 90lbs, 8 quarts of oil add another 15lbs and so on. The difference in weight is pretty small when you look at directly competing ICE. Yes, there's definitely an issue of tire wear because of the power the cars put down, but I've driven powerful cars since long before I drove an EV and they are all in the 3.5-4.5 second range and had tire wear similar enough that I don't seriously believe it's a factor.

When you're talking petabytes and "reading DNA", I don't think 60 minutes is the right order of magnitude.

I'm not sure this is going to be public facing. Many of the objections seem to assume that it is. OTOH, AI is known for returning the answers you want it to return, regardless of the truth of those answers. So perhaps it's the perfect yes-man.

I'm not going to claim those are harmless, but banning them appears more socially destructive than allowing them.

Going to a particular date on a tape is a seek operation. A better reply would be that there's more than on kind of cassette. (1/2" tape has been in cassettes before, just not the kind you usually think of. And that was durable enough to allow a reasonable number of seeks. But I'd sure hate to have to patch a tape with that density.)

But how long does it take to search to the particular bits you were looking for? How many times can you search through the tape before it breaks? There are reasons random access cassettes were never popular.

It's not hard to believe. There are lots of plausible explanations. Most likely some of the chips are multi-function,but sold to do one particular job (so only partially documented).