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.

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

Don't see too many cars on walking paths and sidewalks. The number of e-bikes on walking paths and sidewalks has skyrocketed. It's almost as if someone decided being a pedestrian is a sinful activity, and that every walkway must now be infested with morons on wheels.

Then let me get started on mobility scooters.

I'd just like them banned from walking paths. At least once a day I'm getting some crazy asshole ringing his bell as he comes flying up behind me. I'm not a fan of any kind of bike on walking paths, but at least the people on regular bikes have more control. The worst are probably older riders who often seem like they're barely in control. And the three wheeled ones take up outrageous amounts of space on smaller paths, regularly forcing other users on some of the narrower paths I frequent to get to the side of the road.

It's hard to imagine, short of motor vehicles, anything more hazardous to a pedestrian than some stupid prick on an e-bike.

Socialism with American Characteristics

Iowa's rolling farm fields of coffee

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.