Even as someone who votes left more than any other way, I'd be entirely okay with killing the AMT. It is a huge pain to deal with.

The real problem, IMO, is that Congress needs to get off its a** and pass laws requiring brokerages and retirement plans to provide all of the tax data in a fully computed form so that you can fill in the boxes on your tax worksheet and be done, rather than having to look through every single line and figure out which ones were short-term, which were long-term, which had foreign tax, etc. Even with TurboTax, even with basically everything coming from Edward Jones, it *still* takes me two or three hours every year to fill in the information correctly for my taxes. I can't imagine trying to do that by hand on paper.

The real problem with requiring icons to be a specific shape is that it makes apps harder to recognize. Just look at how much confusion Google's icon rebranding has been, with every icon looking a lot like a multicolored square, and you'll understand what I mean. Now imagine every app icon on an entire operating system being a rounded square.

Certainly true for highways, yes. There's also next to no good alternative to individual cars for highway driving, though. Amtrak is very, very limited, Greyhound is slow *and* very limited, airplanes are grossly fuel inefficient and are generally limited to relatively long distances, and that's about it.

Not sure why you think people would drive fewer miles. Most people in cars are trying to get to a specific place, not driving just to drive. Would people plan shorter trips? Maybe for some small percentage of leisure driving, but leisure driving is already a small percentage of driving, so that's a small reduction in fuel use for a small percentage of a small percentage of trips. That's hardly worth the negative impact on everything else.

That's not how stock grants work. That trillion dollars doesn't come from Tesla. It comes from the stock market through share dilution. The company can absolutely still be profitable no matter how much equity it chooses to give out.

China's population is starting to fall, as they have the same problem every developed nation does with low birth rates.

That's based on an assumption that as their electricity consumption increases, so will their per-capita emissions. They won't, they are falling and will continue to do so. The momentum of the reduction is higher than that of the increase in output.

China's per-capita emissions have peaked, as have their overall emissions. Their population will continue to make gains in quality of life and move to urban living, but their emissions (both metrics) won't ever exceed the peak seen earlier this year.

Won't happen, at least not with my books.

There is a reason writing the last one took two years. Many of its passages have very carefully considered wordings. Intentional ambiguities. Alliterations. Words chosen because the other term for the same thing is too similar to another thing that occurs in the same paragraph. Names picked with intention, by the sound of them (harsher or softer, for example).

I've used AI extensively in many fields. Including translations. It's pretty good for normal texts like newspaper articles or Wikipedia or something. But for a book, where the emotional impact of things matter, where you can't just substitute one words for a synonym and get the same effect - no, I don't think so.

This is one area where even I with a general positive attitude to AI want a human translator with whom I can discuss these things and where I can get a feeling of "did she understand this part of the book and why it's described this way?".

Which country is unwilling to do anything about climate change in this discussion?

I mean from a point of view of addressing the problem and figuring out who needs to do better.

Comparing US and China on a total emissions basis makes no sense, unless you are saying that China's brutal one child policy wasn't brutal enough.

Many Chinese citizens enjoy a very modern lifestyle, similar to Western ones. Their emissions have peaked too, and as the rest of them move away from the agrarian lifestyle they are not going to reach the peak level, let alone US ones.

What is the point of looking at total emissions if you are unwilling to do anything to address them specifically?

Per-capital is the only thing that matters, and in China it matters a great deal because they are proving that they can develop into a modern, industrial economy, with a high standard of living, without having to replicate developed nation's high emissions. In fact, the way they are doing it is giving them huge advantages like abundant cheap energy.

Welcome to Slashdot. Anything that suggests China may not be the biggest bad doesn't tend to fare very well.

IKEA stuff is usually decent quality, and being a big popular brand is usually well supported too. Using Matter means no internet connection needed, should work with Home Assistant.

Hopefully this shakes up the market a bit and drives down costs. Their air purifiers are good too, and are disrupting the market with their much lower prices.

Per capita is the only measure that matters, unless you are willing to suggest culling billions of people as a solution.

Even in the US it's a bit more complicated than that. Most jurisdictions only allow trademarks on common words in very narrow markets, so e.g. Microsoft's claim on "visual" only applies to development software products, and not other types of software, or anything that isn't software.