Can we expect algorithms to have imperfect responses in the worst case situations, yes. A good system would not allow itself to be used in situations where it can not safely operate in the same way that the safety switches are on heavy equipment to prevent operation when humans are present. Tesla's Autopilot has some of this present, but it does miss some really critical problems like sharp turns.

You don't need full level 5 self driving to reduce the number of fatalities. Level 3 with aggressive driver warnings would be sufficient for a huge reduction in traffic fatalities. Rain and snow don't cause many deaths, the winter months have the fewest car fatalities because drivers are slower. Most fatalities are during the day, because that's when drivers are on the road. And most fatalities are the result of 2 cars crashing into each other with the majority being simple collisions at intersections and head on, both of which would indicate someone wasn't paying attention to a light or car.

https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/overview/introduction/

It's a little over $3/month/student so for a class of 30 students, it would be about $1,000/year. California teachers received a generous (/s) raise of 1,300 last year as inflation. Although of course that's average and given the salary schedules that districts publish show pay increases are typically much lower than 1k/year with many freezing pay for multiyear periods.

https://www.ousd.org/Page/16118

At least when the value of Celsius goes to 0, Fahrenheit is still worth 32.

There are adapters for the AC only Type1 CCS chargers have been out for ages but Tesla combining AC + DC pins introduces problems with the CCS standard which requires active handling. The AC+DC CCS to Tesla adapters only came out the last year and anything that plugs into a Tesla charger would need to handle the possibility of either an AC or DC supply.

"Religion is a mostly harmless delusion."

This is a very localized view in terms of personal identity, time, and space. You don't need to look too far to find millions of people denied the human right marry their partners, to access education as a woman, to have body autonomy, to avoid having their gentiles mutilated, and in the most extreme cases to avoid getting murdered. Almost every thing list there has had a religious motivation and was a thing in the West ranging from the 1950's or later. Most but not all have been abolished but there's still billions of people living outside of the West in communities which do support multiple practices there.

It took over a century of effort to dismantle laws which had purely religious motivations which is amazing considering how many people where oppressed in some way or another by these policies.

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-products/imports-and-exports.php
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/natural-gas/imports-and-exports.php

The highest amount of net importation in natural gas and petroleum was in 2005. There is a 15 year run of the US becoming less dependent on foreign supplies and we're very close to net export of both natural gas and petroleum if not already. We're producing twice as much petroleum domestically as we did during the peak of the Bush Jr years and our consumption barely changed. Supply and demand is still a thing, but there's also a global demand and other players can impact the supply for geopolitical gains.

'Drill baby drill' happened even under Obama. For the most part, in terms of their actions, Democratic Administrations have never directly reduced fossil fuel production by any significant amount. Most of those deviations in production at least correlated with global economic events although admittedly there were only a few years in the last 50 that Democrats actually had both the executive and legislative branches so they've been operating neutered for most of the time.

Democrats largely have not harmed production. Their focus point is consumption but public transit is off the table in the USA so actually effective plans have largely been in terms of things like energy efficiency building codes and fuel efficiency.

Both sides have members who support dumb policies. But the policies are not the same and neither are the ratios. Environmentalism wasn't always a polarized topic. About 95% of all congress in both sides supported the legislation that created the EPA. The 1990 Clean Air Act Amendment which created the original Cap and Trade program had 90% support. These where supported by Nixon and Bush Sr. Both sides were working together and creating legislation that is still helping us to this day.

But that was 30+ years ago and while some of the congressional members have been in office just that long the political winds have one side completely opposed to solutions to these problems at least at a national level. Pretending that both sides are the same is ignoring everything that they are campaigning for. One side regularly talks about abolishing the EPA, the other is trying to walk the line between losing a few precious Green Party voters and corporate funding. I'm not a fan of the Democrat's environmental policy since it's too weak, but lets not pretend the other side hasn't doesn't get a hard on when they hear the chant 'Drill Baby Drill'.

Clearly the website is the problem and the solution is a publicly available blockchain! We can give coins out for adding new information to the chain as an eco-friendly alternative to solving the complex sudokus.

You can think of it mathematically. If you fired objects off in random orbital vectors then the number of paths going through a given region is not going to be uniform and will be dependent on attractive and repulsive forces. In a world without gravity, a collision with an object would just be its cross-sectional area. But gravity effectively increases the cross sectional area of objects like the Earth depending on the relative velocity.

The L2 point is at an unstable equilibrium so any objects stationary to it will get pushed away, even radiation pressure would cause this. Most of the objects in the solar system have roughly orbital planes so objects which are near the Earth's orbit will also get pushed away. Random perturbations from gravitational interactions will tend to circularize orbits as the number of random interactions increase so those highly elliptical orbits are very rare. Smaller particles add additional force from the solar radiation pressure which will exert non-constant force depending on position.

Much of those are able to be confirmed based on observations. Trojan asteroids show the impacts of the inverse phenomenon. We can observe the orbital parameters of asteroids and planets and figure out which types of paths are likely for large objects. We can measure radiation pressure and know the impact of it on smaller bodies as it's forces become more significant.

Twitter's biggest target point is 'broadcast' style social media as opposed to normal sites which are either directed at a specific group of friends/followers or cases like here where it's intended for a very narrow audience of you and some lurkers.

Broadcast style social media works well for celebrities and public service statements. But if the only people who are actually going to read your Tweet are your close acquaintances most other social media platforms do that. Public service statements would be best with web interfaces since every entity with that specific use case already has prior infrastructure.

If you're browsing places and you see one thing blurred, it draws all of your attention. Face and license plate blurring works fine because we expect to see it everywhere so it's not abnormal. Having an abnormal object blurred tells everyone around that you really don't want this thing seen and there's a wide range of motivations that could apply.

We're in a world where everyone has access to any number of databases and they're regularly copied by third parties. The train left the station on keeping information off of those public records. The best practice is to keep your information boring and if the thing interesting is your name, to obfuscate that detail.

You are an extreme outlier but at the end of these calculations I do agree.

The average active user is closer to 25 hours per month and the average in the US is 32 hours. Average song is 3.5 minutes long so you'd expect to have ~500 songs streamed per month per user.

Family plans and other countries reduce the price to say an average of $5/month. This gives the total amount of ~1 cent per stream. Spotify reportedly pays artists between 0.3 and 0.5 per listen with a lot depending on the rights breakdown so clearly ~0.5 cents is the total payout to all rights holders and Spotify gets 0.5 cents or 50% gross revenue at maximum. That's a little high for a content provider but they're also providing hosting and have 1 employee per 2k subscribers which is likely mostly support either for the customers (dirt cheap) and music industry (bloody expensive).

Well, I used to think Spotify was screwing over artists but math has changed my mind.

I doubt that there is a realistic expectation that any national or corporate secret is safe from other major players. The US government has demonstrated glaring IT oversights that would have been trivial to exploit since there wasn't effective internal protections: Chelsea Manning & WikiLeaks for example:

Chelsea Manning was able to download 750,000 intel documents(pages?) in less than a year. Our security systems were so poor that accessing multiple pages per minute every single work day was not flagged quickly and in the official timeline as many as 90k documents were saved on a single day or 2 to 3 per second. Webforums from the mid-2000's had better security to protect against spam bots and password attacks.

Flying people around doesn't mean it's to avoid a catastrophe. In a month I'm flying a thousand miles to attend a PowerPoint presentation that could have been recorded and emailed of wasting 15 engineering days for our team alone let alone all of the others who are traveling from as far away as Australia.

There are a few positions where it really would make sense to have people arrive on site quickly. Not because it's going to blow up, but because each of these facilities produces an average of 1GW of power and electricity costs a bit more than 0.1 Euro/KWH in France. 1 hour of downtime is close to 100,000 Euros of lost revenue. That's not an insignificant incentive.

"Can they all charge an iphone at full speed? Most chargers really aren't well marked at what wattages and voltages they support; its nice to be a buy a new $1000+ device and just get a charger you know properly supports it, and that isn't a cheap knock-off that will last 5 days."

Presumably this would be redeemed at an Apple approved supplier (like their own stores). But either way at least in the US almost every single AC to DC supply has voltage and current or power clearly labeled. Heck, you probably have a USB-A power supply that says 5V 2.1A since that is such a common regulator source. But then again, I'm only used to USB-C based chargers where it is standard policy to have the voltages and wattage labeled due to the different ranges.

"The idea of an in-box offer isn't bad, but you shouldn't need to rely on the phone being charged in order to claim your free charger."

K.I.S.S. is the best approach here. Give a one time coupon code on a printed paper in every box if it doesn't get added on checkout.