If the price goes up, that provides a massive incentive for suppliers to find alternate routes, including routes that wouldn't be economical under normal prices, or fix existing routes quickly. When the road's blocked, it becomes worthwhile to put in the labor to clear the road yourself because there's a payout waiting for you. If you can't charge anything extra, maybe you wait for the government to come in and clear the road, which could take days or weeks.

It's not as if we have a shortage of online content. The supply has actually increased tremendously and thus the effective market price of any individual piece has gone down. That sucks for the content producers, because their business is less profitable than it used to be, but no one said they were entitled to a certain level of profit. If they want to make more money, it's up to them to figure out how, preferably by innovating and contributing something new to society rather than rent-seeking.

Which is inevitable in a team of any significant size. People aren't aware of the distinction, they have their editors set incorrectly, or they're just "rebels" who refuse to conform to what The Man tells them to do. You're going to end up with code that only looks right with one tab setting or the other anyway, sometimes mixed together in the same file. The only enforceable standard is just to ban tabs altogether, which can be an automated check at submit time.

The use case is obviously something like Fukushima, responding to an industrial accident no one was expecting. Even if you can deliver a self-driving car to the site, it might not be useful in the particular environment you're facing. Odds are, you're going to have to cope with the equipment that's already on site, which is primarily designed for humans.

You underestimate both the incompetence and the malice of politicians. They can find a way to make it worse. And they'll sell it to you as "reform" because you don't care what it is as long as it's different.

Don't you think that's a problem? As bad as plurality voting is, it's always possible to make things worse, so maybe we'd better talk to some statisticians and subject matter experts before we jump at anything.

It's just not the case that evolution always leads to an optimal design. Evolution has a tendency to get stuck on "pretty good" solutions because some random decision early on limited the future solution space.

It's also not true that evolution is somehow finished with humans, having already figured out how to squeeze every ounce of efficiency from our brains. We are not the end product of evolution. For all we know, future generations may have more efficient brains than we have.

It is hardware running Linux. You can even install Ubuntu if you want.

Even if you have enough bandwidth, it's still a waste to download the entirety of Wikipedia when you only need one or two articles at a given time. In your hypothetical world where bandwidth is so cheap that you can afford to download the whole Internet constantly, you'd be constantly deleting massive amounts of stale data that you downloaded and never looked at before it got superseded by newer data.

Besides, while we may have more bandwidth in the future, there will be more data in the future too. Bandwidth will probably never grow fast enough to catch up. Cheaper bandwidth will also allow people to share more data, making the problem even worse.

You can download a copy of Wikipedia to your PC, but nobody does.

So why does the store's supplier give them a price break at 1,000 units, 10,000 units, 100,000 units, etc.? Large sales reduce transaction costs and mitigate risk. Would you rather sell $5,000 worth of fruit to one person or spend all day at the farmer's market hoping to sell $5 worth of fruit to 1,000 people?

If you've ever purchased anything for a business, you know this is the standard, not the exception. Excuse me if I don't believe that the music industry, that paragon of clear thinking and fair dealing, is the only sane business out there.

If you told the young Aubrey Drake Graham that someday he'd be making "only" $1 million a year as a musician, he'd probably be thrilled.

What are you talking about? Very few prices scale linearly with quantity. It's far more common to for the unit price to go down with quantity. At the grocery store, you can buy one piece of fruit for a dollar or five for four dollars. Buy a truckload of fruit and you'll get an even better rate. Is the business model of selling fruit "insane"?

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Sure, you can get humans to agree to a convention for describing positions. After all, that's what latitude and longitude are. But the fundamental reality of the universe doesn't know anything about human conventions or Greenwich.