Stop calling them hoverboards!! They do not hover in any shape or form

Sure. Just as soon as you stop calling cars by animal names... It's not a mustang, not a jaguar, not a ram, not a cougar. None of those animals have cup-holders. It's false-advertising!

batteries don't store as much energy per mass as gasoline -- not even close -- but as we push in that direction we shouldn't be surprised that they start behaving less like electronics and more like explosives.

That's moronic. NiMH has about 2/3rds the energy density by volume (not weight) of Li-Ion batteries, and NiMH is about the most stable battery you can get, which won't explode or burn no matter how badly you abuse them. Similarly, LiFePo4 batteries are slightly less powerful than the more common Li-Ion chemistries, yet they're extremely stable and safe, too.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Lead-acid batteries have the lowest energy density (by weight) of any battery technology, and they're pretty dangerous, with both dangers of spilling a moderately strong acid, and routine flammable hydrogen out-gassing.

In the hydrocarbon world, diesel/kerosene has higher energy density than gasoline/petrol, but is much more stable and less flammable. And we don't even need to talk about bunker oil (basically tar) that large ships have to preheat and liquify to burn in their engines...

In short, energy density has NOTHING to do with it.

Look how much harder it is for a minimum wage worker to buy a house than it was 50 years ago.

That's almost entirely a result of PROPERTY prices in dense cities, and also 50 years of population growth. Even today you can get an extremely cheap house, easily afforded on minimum wage salary, just not in a big, dense city.

People only insist on living in the expensive cities because good paying jobs are increasingly found only there. Once a crummy job will allow you to afford all your necessities, that can quickly change. In fact whenever the jobs market slows down, there's a mass exodus of people away from the expensive cities.

There's no reason to believe that automation over the next century will be able to replace ALL human tasks. There WILL be some jobs humans continue to do better than machines. The pay may fall, but automation will cause the cost of living to plummet at the same time. Imagine buying a car for one a day's wage.

Agriculture did this long before manufacturing. That's why people can spend less than 15% of their wages on all the food they can eat. Just try and point me to the 100% automated farms...

100% Automation coming soon. And there is no economic model to tell us how that is going to work.

It won't be 100% automation, it will be 99% automation, and we have a historical example in agriculture. It used to be that nearly everyone had to be a farmer, producing their own food to survive. Now a tiny fraction of the population can run the machinery to produce ample food for everyone.

So manufacturing and distribution is heading this way too? Great! I'm tired of paying $1000 for a refrigerator... When they get down to $10, you can tell me how horrible near-complete automation is for our economy. I've seen this happening in my own lifetime... The most basic power tools cost several weeks of salary a few decades ago. Now you can buy a complete drill for about 1-hour of minimum wage salary. Clothing used to be an investment, too, and sewing machines were everywhere so rips could be fixed. Now you just throw out anything with any imperfections.

When this model transfers over to home construction, medicine, and other skilled-labor-intensive industries, we'll be in good shape. Your biggest monthly costs getting driven down to 1% the price will let even the poorest live comfortably. And when you don't have to pack into a few big cities to get a high-paying job to survive, the expensive cities will slowly dissipate. People will disperse to cheaper areas and do some trivial little jobs that never-the-less easily pays for all their living expenses.

Great rebuttle to my response there...

Most people have cellphones now, with no landline phone backup. In an extended power outage, it's likely the landlines will keep running on backup generators long after the cell towers' 4hr batteries (mandated by the FCC after hurricane Katrina) have run out of juice. Fortunately, most people still have landlines for their INTERNET access. That is assuming you have some power, while the area around you does not, for whatever reason.

Of course I would resort to a quick email to friends and family, not some clunky , proprietary web service. Email to SMS gateways are probably a good option to keep in mind, too.

California has given up on bringing new power generation online,

"Almost half of all capacity added in 2013 [across the US] was located in California." "Nearly 60% of the natural gas capacity [across the US] added in 2013 was located in California." http://www.eia.gov/todayinener...

California's total electrical generation capacity has gone from 55,344 MW in 2001, to 79,359 MW in 2015. That's an average increase of 1,644 MW of new capacity going online each and every year.

http://energyalmanac.ca.gov/el...

Energy standards in California call for 33 percent of the stateâ(TM)s power to come from renewables by 2020 and 50 percent by 2030, and so the state is building new wind and solar capacity as fast as possible. The recently built Ivanpah plant was the world's largest, and it's in California, not Arizona, for good reason.

In fact you can get a current list of power plants planned, under construction, and newly online, here:

http://www.energy.ca.gov/sitin...

Conservation is fine is a short-term solution to shortage - of anything - but in the long run there is no substitute for generating more power

California "has one of the lowest per capita total energy consumption levels in the country. California state policy promotes energy efficiency. The state's extensive efforts to increase energy efficiency and the implementation of alternative technologies have restrained growth in energy demand." https://www.eia.gov/state/anal...

Do people really have to watch HD videos on cellular? Can't they wait until they get home near their WiFi's?

The cellular market is competitive, while the wired internet market is not. It won't be long before cellular internet service is cheaper than wired. In fact that has long since happened for light users.

You get charged about 3X as much for the same DSL speeds today as you did a decade ago. Cable has side-stepped the issue by just NOT providing lower speed service, and having their lowest-cost offering being $60/mo. Just look at Charter buying TW and dropping those pesky $15 service plans. And these are increasingly getting a low bandwidth cap, and customers are being forced into bundles.

My old flip-phone from 10 years ago lasted about a week on a single charge. Obviously, though, that's because it was doing jack-crap processing-wise compared to the mini-supercomputers we now all have in our pockets,

But how many years of process shrinks, improved LEDs, better radios, higher capacity batteries, etc., has it been since that flip phone was made? If manufacturers were chasing battery life, instead of biggest screen, thinnest phone and fastest processor, we could easily have smartphones running for several days between charges. Charging your phone twice a day has become the new normal, so nobody returns their power-hungry phones, and it's not prominently advertised, so manufacturers don't expect more sales from improving upon run-time and don't bother.

Think of it like web search engines just before Google came along... Everybody sucks equally, and one disruptive innovator jumping in could wipe the floor with everybody else.

what color is grass when it is dead? 1 green, 2 blue, 3 yellow, 4 brown.

I HATE questions like this. All those captchas, as well as text book questions back in my school days, you have to pretend to be an idiot in order to guess the answer they want (which is often different from the "right" or "correct" answer).

What color is dead grass? Yellow seems a reasonable choice to me. I've seen lots of yellow spots in otherwise green lawns everybody calls "dead patches". Green might be the correct answer in many places where owners have resorted to painting the dead grass (or dirt) to fulfill HOA or city requirements. And all these exceptions to the simplest question you could come up with!

Google's capchas are pretty terrible, too. Click on photos containing houses? Lots of squareish (possibly commercial) buildings in there could go either way. And how many people call their condo or apartment their "house"? So those high-rises might qualify, depending on your POV. And that's before you get into homelessness and photos of bridges, dumpsters, empty cardboard boxes, etc.

My physics textbook had the worst stupid questions. Some seemed intentional tricks, but I'm not so sure in hindsight, as so many others were just idiotic and wrong. "What falls faster, a bowling ball or a feather?" The supposed correct answer is both are equal, because you're wrong to just assume we're on Earth in an atmosphere. But with "Does a car use more gas when the headlights turn on?" the accepted answer is Yes, and there's no consideration of different models with massively overpowered engines which won't even notice the different in load.

I'll wrap up my rant here.

Most of those issues CAN'T even possibly happen with a corporation, others won't because of the profit motive, etc. So you're just making a fool of yourself trying to hand-wave away those problems.

G.fast over copper = gigabit dsl

Only if you can throw a rock out your window and hit the DSLAM, are you going to get gigabit speeds over DSL. In a realistic scenario, even the best-case is less than half that... data rates of 500 Mbit/s up to 100m from the DSLAM.

broadband
(ËbrÉ"ËdËOEbænd)
n
(Telecommunications) a transmission technique using a wide range of frequencies that enables messages to be sent simultaneously, used in fast internet connections. See also baseband

When DSL stops using multiple frequencies, you can stop calling it broadband. And don't forget that Ethernet is baseband, no matter how fast or slow it may be. /. used to have a technical audience... I guess this place is all but abandoned, now.

Imagine for a second, that the municipality owned that last mile, and leased it based on the customer/subscriber and the Vendor having a contract for service.

Okay:
* Network build-out goes slower, and is even more strictly limited to those politically and financially influential areas.
* Your city goes into bond debt, which doubles the cost, and raises taxes to fund what build-out they do.
* Internet prices are higher, as the government insists on getting all their money back, up-front.
* Service is worse, as your municipal government isn't nearly as financially motivated to fix or upgrade lines, and you don't even have a duopoly with competing lines to switch to.
* The guys hired to do this will be firms that specialize in filling-out paperwork properly, with no skills to speak of.
* Those in charge will be political appointees who have no technical knowledge and do everything the worst way possible.
* You can't vote with your wallet, and in the general election, a few angry internet users is too small a voice to be an election issue or affect the outcome.
* You can forget about EVER getting speed upgrades, as there's no competition or incentive in general for the municipality to ever do better.

The gas and water lines running under major cities are notoriously over a century old, only getting replaced when they fail in spectacular fashion. Service is overpriced compared to alternatives, and frequently structured so you're required to PAY the basic rate even if you aren't hooked-up to and using them. And that's with a technologically simple, low-tech utility service.