"Falcon 9 is only partially reusable,"

You make it sound like they are barely reusing half of the rocket..... The first stage has 9 engines and has a dry mass of 22.2 tones, the second stage has 1 engine and a dry mass of about 4 tones and the fairings are about 3.7 tones. So by mass they reuse ~84% of the vehicle and by engine count (likely most of the cost) its ~89%. Though other companies are working on "partially" reusable launchers Rocket Lab and a couple Chinese companies appears to be the only one putting any real effort into it. Adeline (ESA) is pretty pathetic, ULA's "smart" reuse is likely to be a paper rocket especially with them getting bought, some people might say "well Blue Origin..." but without a major change in their company philosophy they'll be where Falcon 9 was 5 years ago when Starship comes online and if their past is of any indication it will take them two more decades to develop a fully reusable rocket let alone something with half the payload capacity of Starship. Rocket labs success will likely be limited to specialized orbits/payloads as they are going to have to burn an engine with each flight and their mass to orbit is pretty limited, the Chinese might have some success with their own program but most major powers (US, EU, UK, Japan, etc) aren't going to let their satellites anywhere near a Chinese launch vehicle.

"there'll be nothing to farm when climate change has turned the topsoil into dust"

Citation? It's always amazing to hear the claims of "science denier" coming from the climate change extremists while they're spouting things that have no scientific basis or are completely disproven by current data/trends. A good example is the polar bear population, back up a few decades and "environmentalists" were claiming as fact that polar bears were going to be extinct in our lifetimes due to climate change. Fast forward to today and their population is double what it was in the 60s and is still on its way up. The same almost certainly goes for this belief that climate change will render the planet into a lifeless desert. Plants actually LIKE higher CO2 concentrations and higher temperatures, sure there is more to farming than just those aspects (rainfall and its timing, wind, nutrients, invasive pests/plants, etc) but humans have a neat trick called adapting, we've done it for a very long time (thousands to millions of years depending on how you look at it). I suggest you look at a chart of average global temperatures over the last billion years or so and see what the "norm" is for Earths global temperatures. All of this is not to say that we should be dumping stuff into the atmosphere willy nilly, but one way or another we'll have to deal with climate change, man made or natural as it is a fact of life on this planet.

https://geology.utah.gov/wp-co...

Oh no, the Enviro-nuts have to endure the same NIMBYism that they've forced upon virtually every other form of development (housing, nuclear, mineral exploration, etc) for decades. Cry me a river. How about this, let people do what they want with their own property (baring actual meaningful impacts like significant sound/smell) and tell the NIMBYs to pound sand on everything (solar, wind, nuclear, commercial, manufacturing, etc) and let the market decide which thing thrives and which fails.

"And always will be? That sounds like a "640k ought to be enough for anyone" kind of comment. "
Did you miss where I said "without major technological improvements", "interim solution" & "or even (as technology improves) another battery".

"Tesla warranties their new vehicles for 8 years or 100k "
While a Tesla (I doubt so for other manufacturers) vehicles battery will, if well cared for, generally last longer than an ICE engine (200k vs 300k miles) when it hits the end of that life the costs are far larger. Even your own article notes that the $10-20k isn't for a new Tesla battery, but for a REMANUFACTURED one which likely has significantly less longevity. Even a pretty high end ICE engine is only on average $10k NEW with the average NEW ICE engine being around $5.5k.

Again, I'm not suggesting we just "stick with ICE vehicles", well designed Plug in Hybrids have most of the advantages of EVs while at least minimizing the drawbacks of pure BEVs. The sweet spot is probably a vehicle with a main battery that costs about $7k NEW setup to last a decade plus and secondary power generator that costs at most $3k so that even if you had to replace both you're still below that of a high end ICE engine.

Early production cars, even with their issues, were significant improvements to horses for transportation. They didn't continually crap all over the streets, requiring dedicated horse crap collectors. You didn't need to continually feed and clean up after your car even when it wasn't in use. Cars could travel much farther/faster than horses. And while horses would probably be a bit better at navigating rough terrain, cars would simply get stuck or maybe break a replaceable part vs horses that could die to exhaustion or break a leg. Which brings up the final issue, dead horses. Dealing with the rotting, bloated, maggot filled corpses was a major headache at the time. A car on the other hand might be an annoyance to deal with, but it could be sold for parts or scrapped. Pure BEVs are almost the exact opposite, being a step back in almost every way, they don't have the range of ICE/Hybrid vehicles, they don't last as long as ICE vehicles, they are turning out to be much more costly overall than ICE vehicles. About their only advantages to consumers is the ability to "fuel up" at home and moderately better performance overall. If you want to sell people on BEVs you have to make them more convenient than ICE/Hybrid, in the same way that the convenience of cars beat out the slightly cheaper horse and buggy. And without major advances in technology and cost that isn't going to happen.

Pure battery EVs are doomed to failure for the mass market without major technological improvements. The batteries are simply too costly, too heavy and don't have the necessary longevity (or the necessary limiters to prevent damage). There have been many horror stories as of late about relatively new EVs that need 20-60k dollar battery replacements and rental companies are abandoning them due to them eating their tires in record time and obscene costs for body work repairs. The sad part is there is an interim solution that would provide most of the advantages of BEVs but few of the drawbacks, well designed plug in Hybrids. Simply design a vehicle from the ground up as an EV, but instead of putting a massive battery in it put a much more modest battery (with battery safeguards) appropriate for daily commuting and then bolt a "secondary power generator" into a corner of the trunk/frunk that kicks in when the main battery gets low. That secondary power generator can be gas, diesel, biofuel, methane, propane, hydrogen or even (as technology improves) another battery, perhaps an aluminum air one. Unfortunately the religious zeal for "zero emission" everything by regulators and activists discourages manufacturers from going that route due because they'll be crushed under the weight of regulations/lack of tax incentives and media hit pieces berating them for "climate denial".

"We have to be careful about making sure that we're not investing in places that are not really yielding a return"

From what i understand that statement doesn't make sense, they don't have to invest anything additional as they can just let their run of the mill Apple app run in comparability mode. But they appear to have gone out of their way to even opt out of that. I think it's safe to say that something else (likely money related) is going on here.

"This is going to end up like self checkout at the store."

Maybe where you are they don't work well, but from what I've seen self checkouts are working great. One or two "cashiers" monitoring a dozen or so checkouts seems to work pretty well. In comparison to a standard checkout where one idiot can bring one of a handful of lanes to a complete standstill, with self checkouts even if there are a few idiots who can't scan a barcode and shove a credit card in a slot their impact is limited to a fraction of the checkouts and everyone else can simply bypass them. Just today I blew through a self checkout in 20 seconds flat (only had 3 items) bypassing a line of people waiting at the one operating cashier checkout who were dealing two customers in a row who needed vehicle loading assistance.

EVs make a pretty terrible rental vehicle for all but a few niche circumstances. The batteries degrade much faster when routinely being charged/discharged significantly and once those batteries reach their end of life the costs to replace them are obscene. And the claims that EV roadtrip recharging delays are minimal have been thoroughly debunked, with many horror stories of a day long trip becoming a multi-day painfilled slog. EVs can work well for a daily commuter vehicle (if the battery/repair costs can be brought under control) but stink for vehicles that spend a lot of time on the road. Well designed hybids (basically an EV with a electrical generator bolted in) might be a different story, but again only if the costs associated with them can be brought into the realm of "normal" vehicles.

What the crap is this? The summary reads less like an article and more like an advertisement.... I just skimmed the article and it pretty blatantly IS an advertisement for Disney Plus and Express VPN. Oh CNET, how far you've fallen.

Came here to say the same, we had a few years where our local fair had a llama section and I don't think it was very popular due to their temperament and smell.

"Satellites have been doing space-space laser relaying for a decade and a half, now."

As a science experiment maybe, but I am unaware of anyone besides SpaceX regularly using laser communications for meaningful data transfers.

You might want to talk to both Blue Origin and ULA then, both of them are launching INTERPLANETARY missions on the first flight of their rockets. One is being launched to the Moon and the other is going to Mars. To be fair neither of these missions are particularly amazing/expensive, but neither is SpaceX's demonstration likely to be. It's likely to be just some extra plumbing and pumps added to a rocket they were going to launch anyway, so basically a test mission on a test flight. If it fails they can always just put it on the next flight.

"The Cochrane finding was not that masking didn't work but that scientists lacked sufficient evidence of sufficient quality to conclude that they worked"

Someone needs to go back to elementary school and learn the basic scientific method, if you can't empirically prove a theory (in this case that masking is effective against COVID) that can be proven/disproven against the available evidence it doesn't pass scientific muster. This is especially necessary in medical situations where the pros/cons can have wide ranging and permanent consequences. There is a reason why most drug trials use double blind studies so bias/placebo effects are less likely to effect the results. The medical community seems to have taken the complete opposite approach since COVID, starting out with a desired conclusion and then only seeking out the evidence that supports it.

"Ride sharing" was never really a thing in a true sense, it was just a slightly techy taxi service where one driver took one customer to a destination. Robo taxis will (eventually) be a much different beast. Where ride sharing was done with personal vehicles, robo taxis are going to be vehicles at least customized if not flat out designed for that purpose. And with advanced routing software they aren't going to be running around with a single customer taking up an entire vehicle. Once the bugs are worked out I'll bet you'll see vehicles that are subdivided into multiple compartments, each company/government agency running them will tie all of their customers into an optimized routing path that will probably have keep 2-4 customers in the car whenever it is possible picking up groups of passengers in a relative cluster and taking them to their destinations (usually another cluster around a business district). You might even be able to scale it up to larger vehicles to a degree but you'd better maintain the comfort/convenience of a "normal" vehicle trip or be ready for people to abandon your service for those that do.