Interesting statistic. I haven't tried the drug, so my response is due to the results I've read reported. I'm a bit surprised that it's as high as 1/4.

Counterpoint: My phone history includes:

• iPhone (original), 5 years
• iPhone 5, 3 years
• iPhone 6s, 8 years
• iPhone 15 Pro, 2 years so far

Assuming I keep the 15 Pro for 3 years (the prior minimum), that's 4.75 years average. I also buy the device with the largest capacity, and always wish it were bigger. Unfortunately, Apple doesn't increase capacity quickly enough for upgrading to help with that.

Upgrading is expensive and it is a pain in the a**. So there are multiple reasons to keep a device until it dies. Some people who buy flagship phones have the same concerns.

The main difference is that flagship phones typically get security updates for five to seven years. Low-end phones are often previous generation hardware that is still for sale, and may get security updates for as little as one year from the date of purchase. So unless you're willing to put your entire life at risk by using a phone that has gaping security holes, low-end phones are often false economy, purchased by people who see the price tag and are too broke to afford a better one, who then end up paying for replacement after replacement at a higher rate because they can't afford a phone that will actually last five or six years.

So I would expect low-end phones to get junked every couple of years, and for high-end phones to get junked when support is dropped, assuming that the owners know that the phone is no longer supported, and the rest of them just end up in a giant botnet, and they replace their phones because they're bogged down with malware a few months to a year after they go out of support.

iPhone users keep their phones longer than Android users, on average. 61% of iPhone users have owned their phone for more than 2 years, versus just 43% of Android users.

So patch availability does appear to have a significant impact on how long people keep their devices.

The most common side effect I've seen reported is nausea. Sometimes that can lead to vomiting, but it doesn't usually.

They're passenger (and freight) trains. The rails were built for travel, not for scenic display.
OTOH, the sure aren't high speed rail. Most of the lines were build over 50 years ago.

OTOH, the BART example was for a "high speed train", though I believe the speed is limited underground. But the rise is from perhaps two or three stories below ground to about 1 story above ground. That said, I believe that the rise is about 2-3 miles long, so it's not steep.

The capacity of the government of a large jurisdiction like California, or more particularly the US, could bankrupt someone like Musk, so I say, bring it on. Within a decade Musk would have abandoned all efforts, or, even better, be stone cold broke (frankly billionaires shouldn't exist at all, and we should tax the living fuck out of them down to their last $200 million).

We're too afraid of these modern day Bond villains when we should be aiming every financial, and probably every real, cannon straight at them and putting them in a sense of mortal danger every minute of their waking lives, so that they literally piss themselves in terror at the though that "we the people" might decide to wipe them out for good.

N.B.: I good system of automated taxis could do the job...but note "good system". Most places I've ever lived the taxis were both too expensive and to difficult to use to do the job.

A HSR network is really problematic without a really good local transit network. (One you can reasonably carry your baggage on.)

Sometimes using the highway ROW works, other times it doesn't. This partially depends on the design of the highways, and partially depends one whether they have the same destination. A train station under a section of elevated roadway can work well...but if you don't have that convenient elevated roadway things can get more difficult.

I can't even estimate costs, but they can get pretty high. (And sometimes it's easy.)

Since there are trains that go over the rocky mountains, I think that argument fails. (But it might succeed if you argue practicality rather than possibility.)

FWIW, The SFBay Area BART system has high speed trains that move from elevated to underground. It's not a steep grade, of course, but it's done. (IIRC "high speed" for the BART system is around 70 mph, and is only obtained on the long straight sections. Of course, my knowledge is multiple decades old.)

There are also real problems with sparsely available origin and destination points. And the cost of building the lines through developed areas.

If you build a good system, it will be more efficient for the areas that it serves. But rail transit has fixed routes. This makes it inflexible. And you really need to multi-track the rails, because breakdowns will occasionally happen.

FWIW, I feel that streetcars are much more plausible/effective/significant per unit cost than are high speed rails. High speed rail is useful AFTER you solve the local distribution problems.

Most geothermal heat plants aren't long term without repair for various different reasons. IIRC, internal fouling is one of the main reasons. This sounds like it might be a different approach, though of course you need a volcano to make it work.

Well, when you extract the heat from the rock it becomes less fluid.

Agree about the meaning of "hallucinate" in this context, but...

You can't be sure your brain is deterministic. It may well have features that operate at the quantum level, with the implied genuine uncertainty. Transistors are normally scaled to avoid that problem. This isn't exactly "free will" in any normal sense, but it *is* non-deterministic behavior, at least as far as we can tell. (Yeah, superdeterminism is a valid interpretation of quantum theory, and so is the multi-world interpretation and a few others that take the entire universe as context. So in some sense it's still deterministic, but it's a really weird sense. And as far as the Copenhagen interpretation [i.e. "shut up and calculate"] goes even in that sense it's non-deterministic.)

I don't think treason could have been made to apply. It's defined in the Constitution, and the definition is a *LOT* stricter than colloquial use.

Ah, but who is the consumer of those resources. Perhaps Google is selling compute to other companies. That could be quite a profitable approach.