Tokyo is an odd choice to bring into this discussion if you are trying to be supportive of having more cars in cities. It's one city where a car is a liability, not a benefit. Getting anywhere in the city would be markedly worse with a private car vs. public transport and/or taxis.

Let me introduce you to the German dual system, https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wik... Solutions are possible when you're not solely focused on the race to the bottom, bro.

You're not entirely wrong, but you are also far from being right. Headsets have their advantages. The problem is that those advantages tend to be for things that are fairly niche. VR as it currently sits, needs scale. AR/XR might be able to give VR some foundation to survive on, but the places it's showing the biggest promise needs substantial development work to move from neat demo to valuable tool & nobody has yet stepped up to pay for that

Definitely not Phillips head. If you look at some of the pictures, you can see that opposite sides of the crosses are offset. These screws are likely Torq-set, which are commonly used in torque critical applications in aerospace.

I know VR is not popular with this crowd, but I'm still holding out hope that we'll have a reliable supply of decent consumer devices for at least at long as I'm still around & kicking. VR is absolutely unbeatable for simracing. Before Oculus came on the scene, anything decent was simply orders of magnitude out of reach, but since then it's been a reasonably steady flow of incrementally better HMDs. What we have right now is honestly really good. I was hoping the next few iterations would move onto a mix of reducing costs vs. additional bells and whistles, but not real sure now. Oh well, or so it goes,or whatever

It has CV joints. Anything with driven wheels not attached to a solid axle will have CV joints.

Please expand on this, I'd love to hear some specific examples of the schools doing these things.

That's exactly what Congress has done. The EPA wasn't just willed into existence be pinko commie leftists, but rather brought about by an act of Congress. Congress followed on by passing a number of acts giving the EPA it's broad authority. If the US operated the way you are starting it should, it would dysfunctional shithole and Congress long-ago would have been reduced to being a rubber-stamp factory just to keep the country running.

Heatpumps can provide greater than 100% efficiency because they are not generating heat, but only moving it. The greater than 100% metric comes from only measuring what you care about. Conservation of energy is maintained, you a just dumping energy where you want it to be, and pulling it from where it is not needed ( thus "pump" in heatpump)

Can't disagree with too much of what you say, but that last bit is way off. You are right, a heat pump likely won't last longer than a gas furnace, but you are way off on the replacement costs... it's maybe more, but think in terms of a few percent more, not an order of magnitude. But... Replacement costs can be difficult to predict. If you are currently replacing a non-condensing gas furnace (circa 20+years old), with a condensing gas furnace (what is now required), you might be facing crazy costs as you now need to find a way to drain away the condensate (which previously would have been carried out the flue).

"Dark Patterns" makes this shit sounds cool & techy. It's not. It's "Asshole Design", plain and simple. We should call it what it is.

You need to get out more. Being poor in America is horrible. There is nothing "pretty good" about it, it's just non-stop shitty with a big steaming turd on top & yet another constantly being flung at you from a random direction. It's a downward spiral where just holding on takes more than most people have in them.
That level of misery is also completely unnecessary. The US has so much & it would take so little just to get to the level of "average" when it comes to building systems to help alleviate and prevent the worst aspects of poverty in the US.
However, you put "the poor" in quotes, like you don't even believe it's real. You really need to get away from that keyboard & go out into your community. Poverty in the US is real.

I'm curious about that. Many Deaf people don't see deafness as something that needs to be "fixed", so things like cochlear implants can be rather controversial. Is non-hearing focused, technologically Augmented communication thought of similarly?

The CDC isn't the author of either the original, nor the revised study that the reason article(s) mention. They did collect & publish data that ultimately was useful for study, but the CDC was in no way involved in the studies. Perhaps if they were, the limitation in the original paper would have been picked up much sooner. Either way, the author of the Reason article does a good job of painting a picture that's simply not supported by the available data.

SDGU = self-defense gun use

Your link is just an analysts "report" on the challenges and opportunities facing an industry (usually funded one way or another from within that industry, then ironically, recycled dozens of times and often dumbed down to get it to a broader audience and get a few more bucks out of the work) The US isn't horrible when it comes to recycling, but it is well behind the EU. Here's some info that actually contains useful data, https://www.weforum.org/agenda...