That and annoying people is why I stopped going. Seeing/hearing people's phones is during the movie is annoying. I have a nice home theater setup at home, my recliner is way more comfortable, and I can pause the movie anytime I want to if I need to use the bathroom, grab a snack, dinner, or a beer, that I don't have pay 10 times more than it's worth.

And if they go that route add surge pricing if they want to start their day at 0800 and end it at 1700, with incentives or discounts if they stagger the opening and closing times as that would do wonders for scalling back rush hour. They have known for decades you just can't afford to build enough roads to handle every single person having to be to work at exactly the same time.

That's mostly because CA and TX both want green energy, but they mean different things. CA wants 'green' energy that has no impact on the environment, which is questionable with wind, solar, and battery due to the sunk carbon cost of building them and mining the requirement materials. TX want's 'green' energy, as in it generates piles of 'green' money. And they figured out how to make money on wind, solar, and batteries (cause they are great for load balancing your electrical grid and making it more profitable), so they built them, and are making money, plus getting some good press for going 'green' as a bonus. But they all know under the covers that after you pay for all the concrete, installation, do all the mining (with highly questionalble labor contracts involving outright slavery in places), that while it makes cash, it is no more the silver bullet to going green than ethonol turned out to be (though that also generated a lot of 'green' cash for corn farmers).

I moved to ebooks simply because I can increase the text size where I don't get a headache after an hour of reading. Signed up for Kindle Unlimited ages ago, reading a 180+ books a year. Haven't run into AI books yet, but my entire reading list is recommendations left in the back of the book by the author, leading me to even more books I enjoy. It's to the point the only subscriptions I have left are Kindle Unlimited and YouTube Premium - mostly for gaming videos and music, don't remember the last time I watched TV or movie, got tired of shows I like getting cancelled on a cliffhanger. Can't really go back to paper unless I want to buy the books with oversized text.

"The optical fiber elements are typically individually coated with plastic layers and contained in a protective tube suitable for the environment where the cable is used" So considering most of the Internet is optical fiber in a protective tube, that would be yes. Even the copper parts of copper wires are contained in a protective plastic tube. Is that the best way to put it, not really most of us would probably call it a sleeve or casing, but it is a hollow cylinder, in which wires or fibers carrying data are placed, which makes it a type of tube. And before say they have to carry a liquid, think vaccum tubes or cathode ray tubes, all electonics (from when he was growing up) ran on tubes, so not too surprising he stil thinks that way.

Is a number equal to 4% of the US population just a 'handful', because that's roughly the number in the US that were not screened through a port of entry? That's a pretty significant amount that came in with zero screening to make sure their immunizations were up to date and they didn't actively have a 'nonendemic disease' when they entered the country. 2 doses of MMR is 97% effective, meaning 3% of the people that were vaccinated are not immune and can get measles if exposed. That 'insular Christian community' is a fraction of of a percent of the population (around 400K), which is a lot less than the 3% of immunized folks (10+ million) that think they are immune but actually are not. Which illustrates why we want herd immunity to protect that 3%.

Surely you aren't talking about the 'world' you need a passport to travel to that drug the rest of us into multiple world wars that lead to the worst 'gun violence' to ever occur? Isn't there still a war going on in that part of the 'world'? Hasn't NATO had to step in to stop genocide recently (Kosovo comes to mind) in that 'world'. The one that left behind messes in places like Isreal / Palestine, India / Pakistan, etc that the rest of us are still trying to clean up. Not to mention their mass geonocide against natives if they were living on land they wanted or had resources they wanted. Plus the whole slave trade thing going back thousands of years, not to mention causing the dark ages with their theocracy. But sure, if you totally ignore history it looks like a great place now, as long as you ignore the pile of bodies it's built on.

Congress would be the most powerful branch, if they didn't delegate all their authority to executive branch agencies or to the President and empower them to make 'rules' which are effectively laws. Because Congress never wants to take a vote that might cost them votes in the next election, and would rather be able to just blame some unelected agency for doing it, or leave it to the courts to decide. They can't even put together a working budget most years, even though that's supposed to be one of their primary jobs (one they took for themselves when they decided instead of just approving the budget they also wanted to write it in the 70's).

Except that in Texas it's legal to use force to prevent the burglary of your property, which someone breaking into your car or stealing it is one of the covered types of burglary. The rules are more strict during the day on reasonable force, at night it's pretty clear you can use any level of force. Even been a few recent cases where a neighbor killed three people robbing a house in the middle the day, shot them in the back with a shotgun when they refused to stop when ordered to. They didn't even charge him. So any State with a Castle Law, they have decided that you can protect yourself and property, instead of just hoping the police can recover it after it's already been stolen. But it's very much case by case for ones like this one, and if the person in the vehicle didn't have a weapon, then it moves into the grey, and it's all up to twelve of your peers.

Might want to ask the Chinese about the Uyghurs, ethnic Kazakhs, and other Muslim minorities they are using as slave labor. And whose children they take to educate as Chinese and punish the parents if they don't fall in line as they work to totally destroy their culture and language. Or maybe the conquered people of Tibet. Seem to recall a lot of saber rattling at Mongolia and Taiwan too. That enough 'what's China trying to' for you, or do you need more?

So your solution is to shut down the farmers that grow the food? Well after a large portion of the population starves to death I guess that would solve the problem. Pretty heartless way to do it though. The actual driver of climate change is too many humans on the planet. Fortunately we are short lived so no need to go all Thanos to change that, or starve them out by shutting downing the polluting farmers, instead focus on lowering the birthrate, then time and aging will resolve the problem. Less people = less pollution.

Well it is a Model 1.0, and we all know how buggy the 1.0 release of anything is.

Not just his, I've never been able to see the difference. I don't buy the high end card for 4K, I buy it to run 4 monitors well, with anything I want running on each of the 4 monitors, and to run any game I want at 1080p without the fans on the graphics card having to go into jet engine noise levels or being forced to move to water cooling so I can hear things over the fan noise.

"I don't understand the MAGA hatred" - Americans in general don't like being told what to do. It's always been that way, it's not new with MAGA. I believe it actually started with King George III, which was just bit before Trump or 'MAGA'. They would have had much better luck with explaining what needed to be done and why, instead of trying "Do it because I told you to." If you want cited examples, start with the 18th amendment, then move on to just how well the 'War on Drugs' has ever stopped any American from doing whatever drugs they wanted to do. Looks though U.S. history and you can find plenty more examples.

There is a solution to that, but you most likely won't like it. All roads become toll roads, billed to your license plate. On the one hand it's annoying, but as long as it goes into a trust fund for highway maintenance that isn't allowed to be used for anything else then it's a use tax, which is probably the most fair tax there is. You use infrastructure X, then you pay a fee to maintain it based on how much of it you use. Other downside which already exists with a toll road, is that means the government gets to track everywhere you go, which can be good or bad for you, depending on if it proves you were or were not at the scene of the crime.