No, investing isn't gambling, it's not black and white like that.

There's more of a scale. At one end you have "gambling" and at the other you have "investing". At the far gambling end of the spectrum you have games of chance (e.g. roulette), binary options (which is gambling dressed up to look like investing), slot machines etc - basically all the types of things where the house always win. At the other end you have things like bonds, traditional long term buy and hold in blue chip companies etc. There's still some risk but on that end of the spectrum, it's not a zero sum game nor "the house always wins".

If you say all investing is gambling because there's some risk and can never be a sure thing, then you get to the reductio ad absurdum argument that absolutely everything is gambling, e.g keeping your money in a savings account is also gambling because that's not a sure thing either.

The murder rate in the USA is around 5 times higher than what it is in Western Europe, so there is some justification to the "murderous pricks" reputation.

To be fair, there were 17250 murders alone in the US (not including suicides) in 2017, versus 723 murders (of all kinds) in the UK in 2017. Turning that into a percentage of population, the murder rate is almost 5 times higher in the US than in the UK, so the view that you're all just a bunch of murderous fucks does have at least some justification.

In other words, never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence.

Having a human that can get bored babysitting automation is fundamentally the wrong way to do it anyway. Until the automation is reliable to not need human supervision, it should be the other way around: the automation monitoring the human to provide an extra safety net, so that the human has to be actively driving and alert rather than getting bored and not monitoring the automation properly.

Surely at 915MHz, it would be a milliwave oven?

Because the people with the skillsets to do these things want to live in California. Places that are nice tend to be expensive because there is high demand to live there, good old supply and demand at work. Places that are cheap tend to be cheap because they aren't all that desirable.

Engineers that can command good pay probably don't want to live in mosquito infested places full of religious fundies such as Alabama. They probably don't want to live in the flyover states where there's no coast and fewer fun things to do during your time off. So if you want to attract the talent, you have to locate where the talent wants to live. The talent wants to live in California, not some bug ridden swamp full of fundies.

GDPR should be a fairly healthy deterrent to anyone implementing anything like this (that is, if the UK doesn't throw it in the bonfire of EU regulation after 2019).

This is a non-starter before we even get to thinking about regulations. I doubt the Uber guy is thinking about typical light aircraft (and weather capability immediately makes doing that completely impractical outside of places with 350 VFR days per year), but probably on the lines of scaled-up quadcopters that can carry people, flying around cities - no doubt based on the recent prototype seen at CES.

It works fine for small RC drones, but the thing is: quad/hexcopters (etc) basically brute force themselves into the air. They are tremendously inefficient and scale badly. To keep the rotor inertia down low enough you can use simple fixed pitch propellers (rather than complex (expensive) collective pitch rotors like a helicopter) they are going to have to be small and high RPM.

The racket will be unbearable. If you think city noise is bad right now just with road traffic, it will be ten times worse if you had even just hundreds of quadcopters big enough to lift people flying around. There will be no refuge anywhere in a city from the unbelievable and annoying racket these things will make - due to the differeing rotor rpms on just one vehicle, there will be an annoying set of beat frequencies generated by the lift systems to add to the ungodly racket from the fundamental frequency.

Today you can go into a city park, even in a big noisy city, and get away from the noise. Walk a couple of minutes into any of the big London parks and it's pretty peaceful. This will be a distant history if there are hundreds of people-carrying quadcopters (or indeed any -copter type vehicle) flying around the city. People living and working in the city just won't stand for it. To add to that, most people don't like flying to start with and only do so because it's the only practical way of crossing an ocean or going somewhere 2000 miles away. In a city, given the choice, a lot of people would rather take a metro system than board some kind of absurdly noisy automated flying machine.

Well that's too bad. In the winter, it's dark when I go to work, and dark when I get home, and since I have no windows - if it's a busy time I could quite easily go from December to Feburary without seeing proper daylight.

The Nissan Leaf is doing quite well where I live - I've seen many Leaves driving around the place, the person I know who has one is pretty enthusiastic about it.

The Federal Reserve does not decide how much a dollar is worth. There isn't some committee collectively raising their pinkies and saying "Today, two Cox's apples will be worth one dollar". The government only has some fairly blunt tools to influence the value of currency (for example, interest rates and quantitative easing) but a dollar is worth whatever someone is willing to trade for it.

The problem with Bitcoin is not that it's value is set by what people are willing to trade for it, but virtually no one is willing to trade goods or services for bitcoin, and instead it has become merely an instrument of speculation.

Unfortunately the so called debunking of the nuclear winter was done by somebody with no knowledge of climate science.

US and USSR scientists, independently, calculated the effect of the nuclear winter in the 1980s and came to the same conclusion. More recently simulations have been run again, this time with better understanding of the climate and massively more powerful simulation tools - and has discovered that the 1980s predictions if anything were optimistic - the nuclear winter effect was actually likely to be much worse. A simulation was also run on a regional conflict between India and Pakistan with an exchange of just 50 weapons. The effects are worse when the conflict occurs in subtropical latitudes. Such a conflict would trigger a "nuclear autumn" that would shorten the growing season in the US midwest by 60 days in the couple of years following the conflict, and would have serious climate consequences lasting about a decade. This level of growing season shortening would cause food shortages and high food prices in the rich industrialised world, and simply result in famine in poorer countries and places where agriculture is already marginal.

A US-vs-Russia exchange with a significant fraction of the arsenal...nuclear winter doesn't even describe it - more like "nuclear six month long night" - the models forecast mid day light levels in the northern hemisphere about similar to a moonlit night. Six months without food growth would kill most of the survivors, before even considering the cold.

On point 4 - young people finding old music and finding it better than 2010s pop - this may just be a case of 'survivorship bias'. The dross will fade away and the good stuff will stick around, but for newer music from the 2010s, the dross still hasn't had a chance to fade away.