Disagree. You aren't loaning money to yourself. If we use your analogy, it's like a father borrowing money in the names of all his kids. Sure, maybe he spent some of it on their food and upkeep, but they are the ones who will ultimately be responsible for the borrowing.

It's a continual struggle everywhere. Here, in Switzerland, the population recently voted to reject a number of extensions to the highway system, preferring to invest more in our excellent public transport system. The job of the politicians in parliament is to implement the referendum the public has voted on.

So what do the politicians do? They commission a study that examines the best places to invest transport money - funny, how it proposes extending the highway system at the expense of public transport. I'm sure none of them are the recipients of any lobbying efforts. /s

We already have a problem: What do you do with people on the left side of the bell curve? You only need so many agricultural harvesters, and even that is increasingly automated.

Factories everywhere are increasingly automated - this is a trend that has been going on for decades. Eliminate factory jobs, and you only need so many baristas and Amazon delivery drivers. So what do you do with people in the middle of the bell curve?

That's a lot of infrastructure to maintain. Semi-permanent costs. Why, exactly, would they want to commit to something like that?

Last In heard, we had passed 3 of 4?

Should we reduce our impact on the planet? Obviously.

However, this oanic-filled clickbait is counterproductive to that goal. Fewer and fewer people take these stupid pronouncements seriously, which leads them to the other extreme of not caring at all.

You have two paddles, one to increase and one to decrease. What it means is this: When you remove your foot from the accelerator, what should the car do? Simply coast freely? Lightly brake? Brake more strongly? Brake really strongly?

When I first moved to an EV, I thought: let's make it behave like the manual gas-powered car I'm used to. I often pushed in the clutch and just let the car coast, so I set the EV to coast. But experimenting, it turns out that light braking is (for me) by far the most pleasing option. Most of the time, when you remove your foot from the accelerator, it's because you are coming up on an intersection, or traffic, or whatever - and you do want to slow down.

This. I use ChatGPT (paid sub) a lot, for work and for private things. Whatever the skeptics say, it is a huge productivity booster.

However, the moment it's answers start integrating advertising, I will switch to any of several competitors.

Even if this is covered somewhere deep in the fine print, thus is unacceptable. Clearly, the product people now have is no longer the product they purchased.

And, really, what's the excuse? The infrastructure is there. Just leave it running for older products, with no further updates.

As much as Sonos has annoyed me over the years, I have to give them this: I own two Sonos Play:1 speakers, which also came out in 2013, and they are still supported. I hope that will continue to be the case...

Reduce our impact on the planet? Sure, let's do that.

More stupid fiddling with processes that we do not actually understand. Stop, just...stop.

But it's great for sucking in greenwashing money, so I suppose that greed will win...

This is exactly the problem. The related problem is that politicians are too beholden to lobbyists paid by those large companies. Hence, the necessary enforcement of anti-trust legislation never happens, or it happens in slow-motion over decades of court cases.

The cure? Make ant-trust enforcement fast and automatic. Determine a maximum allowed size for a company, measured by turnover. Any company reaching half of this size is prohibited from M&A activity. Any company that reaches that size must divest. No discussion, no long court cases --> it happens, or the execs go to jail. This should apply to all industries, from tech to banking. It also solves the "too big to fail" problem.

One can discuss what the maximum size should be. However, it clearly needs to be much, much smaller than Alphabet/Meta/Apple/Blackrock/Goldman-Sachs/etc.

Anti-trust needs to go farther, and be automatic. Set a maximum company size. Exceed that half that size, and M&A is forbidden. Exceed the full size, and you must divest.

Measure size on gross turnover. Automatic and no exceptions: banks, medis houses, tech companies, everyone.

They are making big moves in space, yet they are currently the biggest source of new space junk. Does this make any sense? If they keep leaving rocket stages floating around in the same area they need for their mega-constellation and other space efforts, they are shooting themselves in the foot...

This is true in all kinds of artistic work. What proportion of painters earn a living by painting? Musicians? Authors?

Heck, it's the same for sports: the top players are millionaires, a few hundred in each sport make a good living, a few thousand scrape by, and there are millions for whom it is just a hobby.

...but no work getting done? Sounds like poor management. Surely the boss should know what his team is doing?

Yup. Years ago, when I was a college Freshman or maybe sophomore, my cousin-in-law (who was Secret Service) asked me to pull credit card numbers off a computer they had confiscated. "Here, have at it, they're hidden somewhere".

I did find them, along with the people's details. It was only in retrospect that I realized: No backups. Hand the computer to a student with no training in evidence handling. Honestly, incompetence at the highest level.

On the other hand, flashing his SS badge in bars got him laid, something he was quite good at.