You can hear the difference by flipping them too. More danger of them rolling under something that way though.

I still see cash and coin, but I haven't seen an actual silver coin in the wild for at least thirty years now.

Prepare for decades under the red glow of an Ur-Quan Kzer-Za planetary shield, fellow humans.

It'd go a long way

You do realize the incident you point to happened 170 miles away, right? And wasn't Haitian? When people say "nobody is eating cats" in the context of the time, they meant Haitians in Springfield. They weren't ignoring half the facts. They were ignoring irrelevant facts.

I worked for 10 years in China with engineers. I'm one myself. This is what I learned:

Most go into it because they don't want to work with their hands. i.e. get dirty. It's not because they have any particular interest. It's for the money and social status. As such, ~80% of the ones I worked with were unimpressive. They do what they are told, nothing more, nothing less. Minimal problem solving skills. No curiosity. Your average US high school student would definitely know less engineering, but could do a better job without being micromanaged.

This isn't to say they were bad people. Some were friends. The system in China just tend to create a lot of these people. And if you are brute forcing a project and able to micromanage, it's a powerful resource.

The other ~10 percent were more typical of Western engineers. Loved technology, hands on, tinkered with stuff, curious, smart. And yeah, a bit nerdy. That said, the work culture still ties their hands. You're to stay in your lane. Don't question superiors. Do exactly as you are told. We had several meetings where it was explained that it is their job to call bullshit on me.

They liked that, but it didn't come naturally. There was one guy that was an absolute master at it. He was incredibly polite about it. So much so that when he started acting a certain way, I knew I'd effed up and just had to wait for him to politely tell me he must be wrong and could I please help him learn where he made a mistake. To this day, I still feel he was being sincere. Dude should teach classes in how to tell your boss he is wrong.

Anyway, just comparing engineering numbers in China and the US misses a lot of nuance.

Please keep defending the government getting involved deciding what speech is disinformation, so this administration can also decide what is hate speech and antisemitism, such as criticizing Israel. Your hypocrisy is precisely why you truly don't deserve any sort of constitutional protections, at all.

Ah yes - the hallmark of authoritarianism: The arbiter of truth is for the church... no... GOVERNMENT to decide. The left was supposed to be the progressive bastion of free speech, but lost all credibility. The right never had any except when they realized, for the most part, that censorship is wrong. Both sides - but particularly yours, is worthy of scorn and ridicule.

Kids these days... Back in my day, we'd punch arson locations into into our TomToms and have Homer Simpson's voice give us there.

Without oil, we lack lubrication for mechanical things, plastic for wire covers, and many other things besides energy. Why, Red Dye 5 is petroleum based, and I don't see that getting banned anytime soo... oh. There may be (more recent) plant-based options for the dye, but plastics and lubricants made from petroleum usually have a much longer lifespan.

Nostalgic

Government sponsored lotteries are worse than a tax. There are whole departments set up using most of the lottery income to pay staff and advertising budgets. How much of the lottery profit goes to pay for things the community needs, like say... help for gambling addiction?
You could add a line on your state's tax form saying "donate a dollar to X fund" and net more money, even if only 5% checked the box, but i suppose someone's friend would lose their job in the lottery commission.

How will we know it's fake if it doesn't make us pause to consider our life choices?

Instead, hire a post-AGI ethicist, post-AGI epistemologist, and other philosophers. What is a research scientist going to do without empirical data except spew forth untestable hypotheses? And once you can test the societal effects of post-AGI, the cat's out of the bag. Science isn't always the peak of useful discourse. Sometimes philosophy gets to rear its ugly head (even the best physicists are doctors of philosophy).