Typically you become that wealthy by having rich parents.

Sure enough, his dad was a stock broker, did well enough to send him to prep school. The contacts and the financial support were all in place before he was born.

I think you are right. Europe may be better off without US style massive GDP gains while the citizens suffer. Also apologies for the UK tanking its GDP with Brexit, I didn't vote for it but it's a pretty damning reflection on our education system.

Appointing Gunn was a good idea though. His DC movies and TV show (Peacemaker) have all been good. Reviews for Superman suggest that it's a great movie and is likely to kick off the next big cinematic universe. Gunn has taken it in a new direction by going back to being more like Reeves' Superman movies. A bit goofy, a bit silly, but compelling. He leans in to how silly the comics are, a big departure from the trend since the late 80s Batman movies of getting darker and grimmer.

Some humans do have a strong desire to become parents, which is unsurprising since species that don't reproduce tend not to last very long. There are exceptions, pandas being the obvious one.

The question is, how strong and how common is this desire to become a parent, and are people overcoming it due to their financial situation or some social pressure, or were we always like this and it's mostly due to contraception?

Education tends to be good as well. Education for women and access to contraceptives are the two big things. They introduced them to places like Bangladesh, and the fertility rate fell from over 9 to under under 2. It's not a particularly wealthy country, but contraception is cheap and education is free.

To be fair, office skills are probably of far more use to most students. As long as the ones who wanted to learn to code had the opportunity to, it seems okay. I'm not complaining about it being lucrative either.

It's a fair question though. Living longer, falling birth rate. No way to fix either without it being kinda brutal.

We will just have to figure out how to deal with it, and it isn't going to be pleasant.

For what they are doing they only need to have image recognition for commonly mis-recycled items, and set the confidence threshold high to avoid false positives. If an item is at an odd angle or covered in dirty so that recognition fails, it doesn't matter.

For sorting waste for recycling it needs to be much more capable of detecting objects and materials, from a huge variety of items, in all shapes and colours, from every angle. It then needs to be able to figure out the geometry of that item so that it can reach out and grab it.

Probably you would engineer it so that it uses non-AI methods to sort as much as possible, like magnets to remove ferrous material, filters to remove smaller parts, tanks to separate material by buoyancy and to wash off some of the crap.

You also have massive wind resources and lots of shallow water to harvest it from.

Clearly they do, e.g. the COVID lockdown protests which lead directly to a reversal of policy.

The Chinese government makes an effort to explain policies and sell them to the population. They also don't have the same cultural hang-ups blocking development, with ideas about natural landscapes having to be kept pristine, or rampant NIMBYism. Like we didn't used to when we built national road and energy networks.

There isn't the big anti-environmental movement in China either, so people don't have weird ideas about renewables and see them for what they are - cheap and clean energy.

China's economy continues to grow and people's lives continue to improve too, so there is little reason to go looking for dumb things to blame for economic problems.

Mazda is kinda floundering. They have failed to develop EV technology and are stuck with hybrids, which will be banned within a decade in some places.

Unfortunately a lot of Japanese manufacturers are in the same boat. Honda had a really great EV, one of the best cars ever made, and then just gave up and rebadged a Chinese model for the follow up. Toyota wasted a lot of time with hydrogen, and seem to be waiting until their solid state battery tech pans out before going all-in. Suzuki are nowhere at all.

Touch screens have their place, e.g. for navigation where you wouldn't want a full QWERTY keyboard on your dashboard. The issue is, as you say, putting commonly used stuff that you want to adjust while driving on there.

One interesting half way option is to have a knob that can control stuff on the screen, allowing you to do some actions with haptic feedback and something to rest your hand on. A couple of the German manufacturers have those, and I thought Mazda did but maybe it was someone else.

Also touch buttons on steering wheels are incredibly stupid, which is probably why Tesla did them.

Copying and remaking videos has been a problem for a long time on YouTube, and AI made it even cheaper and easier to do.

That said the only AI stuff I've seen are fake movie trailers in 1950s style, and a few bit of AI generated imagery in history videos to illustrate events from before cameras were invented.

Shame they can't make an AI rubbish sorting robot instead. Lob it all in one bin, and let the machine pick it apart for recycling.

It's a difficult problem because it involves complex machine vision and dexterity.

Remember that we are on the hook for the clean up costs too. Also the usual subsidies, free insurance, nuclear safety, the whole fuel cycle.