What an utterly naive interpretation of world history you have. I can assure you, if you'd been a Jew being rounded up for extermination in WW2 you'd have a different opinion. Likewise, if you were Chinese or Korean being subjugated by Imperial Japan, you'd have a different perspective. There is such a thing as a "just war" even though you somehow ignore the concept. It's usually when your opponent starts the war and is hell bent on eradicating you and your way of life.

Alas, you sit there in perfect safety and comfort, passing judgement on those who sacrificed fa more than you can ever imagine so you could impugn their sacrifices.

Banned for who? And who's going to enforce this ban?

You have to remember any treaty (a) must have signatories that agree to follow it and (b) there must be a method of enforcement. If you lack either of these two conditions, the treaty has no effect.

Not sure how you think you could pull that off, but whatever.

Again...exactly how do you plan to accomplish this? It's not like Iran hasn't been firing missiles at our carriers this whole time. Yeah, it's a halfhearted effort by the Iranians, but what exactly do you think would happen to Iran if you managed to even damage one of our carriers, much less sink one? I can describe it thusly: the American gloves would come off. Iran would be plastered into oblivion via conventional bombardment, and there's very little Iran could do to stop it. Sure, we'd take losses, but the Iranian regime would cease to exist in totality. America has had this option available to it since day one. We haven't exercised it. Not because we couldn't do it but because we chose not to. Do not mistake restraint for a lack of capability.

You might want to read up on how current hybrid vehicles actually work, 'cause it seems you have more than one misconception going on.

I have. For instance, my latest vehicle is the Ford F-159 XLT,, the full-hybrid model of the F-series pickup truck line. Power train is:
  - 6 cylinder dual-turbo engine. (runs low power but approoximately doubles output when a lot is needed.)
  - 47 HP motor-generator "pancake" on the engine side of the ttransmission, to scavenge / return power to./from a 1.5 kWhr lithium battery.
  - 10-speed automatic transmission, working with the lithium battery;s main alternator to fine-tune match the engine/mogen to the current driving situation. Max power of engine plus hybrid mogen; 430 hp.
  - full four wheel drive.

So it's primarily a gas-engine power train with an electric-car motor mechanically coupled to the engine shaft. Many other hybrids, from the venerable prius onward, are similar, with plug-in variants having a big scavaging/peaking battery good for pure electric operation of tens of miles rather than a minute or so and a wall-powered charger added.

What I'm looking for is essentially a pure electric - totally electronic "transmission" consisting of alternator(s) between the batteries and the motor(s), plus a tiny engine-generator able to burn gas and feed some teens of KW of charging power into the batteries when running down the road or parked near it.
 

Do the Waymo batteries use one of the lithium chemistries including cobalt, or a non-cobalt chemistry such as lithium iron phosphate?

Cobalt chemistries have a higher power/weight and energy/weight ratio, which made them the go-to chemistries for vehicle batteries. But they also produce oxygen when the cells overheat, leading to an unextinguishable runaway fire hazard: A burning cell makes enough heat to ignite the adjacent cells, so the whole assembly of them goes. Bad enough when it's a car's worth, but a disaster if it's a shipping-container sized module of a utility energy storage site. (And even worse when the site is a building full of racks, which someone had "protected" from fire with water-spraying, equipment-shorting system, so the whole site burns up, as happened recently with one in California creating a toxic mess.)

That's why purpose-built stationary lithium energy systems use non-cobalt chemistries - heavier, but a shorted cell just kills itself without getting hot enough to light off its neighbors.

I want to see inexpensive plugin hybrids.

But not like the current ones, which are primarily an engine/tranny powertrain with a motor/generator + small battery for scavenging downhill/braking energy for later accelleration/uphill/cruise/power-boost.

I want ones that are primarily a battery-electric with a small aux engine-generator (say 15-20 HP range), big enough to power crusing with a bit left over for gradually charging. That would let you range-extend by the size of your gas tank plus fillups (i.e. indefinitely if only gas is available) or go from battery empty to back on the road in a couple tens of minutes.

The backup engine would only run at max-efficiency speed and could use an atkins-like cycle (see "liquid piston engine") to get the max power out of the fuel. Most operation would use power-grid charging (when available and cheaper than fuel).

How do you shut down an organization like the CIA? The mere hint of a serious attempt to tear it down would result in assassinations and the hiding of some data (critical of CIA personnel) and the backup of other data (in preparation for blackmail, etc.).

Perhaps a replacement agency could be set up, then the CIA slowly defunded with most current employees prohibited from future government employment.

Are ads the problem? My impression is that the danger of social media is the presence of people promoting violence, whether those people are loonies, nihilists, or agents of enemy governments.

Children need to be taught critical thinking, and also taught to recognize hucksters and hate-mongers.This should be a continuing part of education and does not need special funding.

Cars have become ludicrously expensive so that fewer and fewer kids actually have access to them.

Irrelevant. Most of grade school education occurs before students can legally drive.

In 1970, the bottom-of-the-line American Motors car was $2,000 (A VW Beetle $1,839.) Now, a Kia K4 LX is $23,535. In 1970, the median income was $8,900, now it's $84.000. Relatively speaking, a new car is now 25% more expensive than in 1970. That's a shame, but it's a better car and it's not "ludicrously expensive."

Troy, N.Y. is a city, not a town, both by the official standards of New York State and the common understanding of what population constitutes a city. What population is needed to qualify as a small town is fuzzy, but the upper limit might be 1,000 or 2,000.

I just checked a dictionary. Mathematically, most can either mean over half or more than anything else. (George got the most votes:2. The other ten candidates got 1 vote each.) Colloquially, most means "generally". In no sense does most require more than 90%.

It's difficult to separate the effects of COVID from the effects of BREXIT. Since 2019, it looks as if England has done slightly worse than the EU, but very slightly better than France. BREXIT has become less popular in England.

I suspect England's problems have more to do with poor quality British politicians than the other effects of BREXIT. I watched some videos of Parliament in session in 2022 and it was comical, one person speaking to mostly empty seats.

There's something off kilter here. These far-right people want to punish foreigners by keeping the foreigners far away where they can't be targeted?

For an incremental improvement, change conditions so that it's in a person's self interest to work a year or 2 longer. Raise the age for getting elderly benefits. Lower taxes for people over the normal retirement age (65?), as was recently done in the U.S.. People are living longer, and having a longer healthspan. It is neither unreasonable nor unfair to encourage them work a bit longer to make their lives better.

The United States workforce is 170 million out of a population of roughly 330 million, over 50%. As I illustrated above, the median household income of $84,000 is more than enough to meet your criterion for a good job. Thus more than 1 in 4, not 1 in 5, have good jobs.

It is not reasonable in this context to consider children, who are 26% of the population. The figures then become 170 million out of 244 million, or 70%, thus 35%, more than 1 in 3, have "good jobs." Then figure in retirees, who are also irrelevant to the job market...