Congestion pricing is only an option in places that have good alternatives to driving, something that a freeway in California does not have.

"or even simulated depictions of those acts"

So they're going to be arresting thousands of actors and film crew now? This basically criminalises making movies or tv shows.

Depends on the country...
Many european countries have welfare and taxation systems that reward having children but punish higher earners.
This creates a situation where the higher earners can't afford to have kids as it would mean time off work, childcare costs etc. Meanwhile those on welfare have every incentive to have more kids.

They read a lot, it's just that the content they read comes from their peers rather than authors with an editorial team to ensure proper grammar and spelling.

Lower rates of teen pregnancy could also be caused by better education about contraceptives, and easier availability of contraceptives.

I'm not sure what confuses you here: everybody has an EoL, age related if nothing else, and they don't live on either through their class or their descendants. What do you gain by throwing more poor bastards into a sucker's game when you could just not?

Yeah, it's ultimately a matter of taste and what becomes economically and strategically feasible; but I figured that there is at least a conceptual distinction between weapons that are better at being obedient(basically any attempt at stable aerodynamics on the low end up to electromechanical gyroscopic stuff, to TERCOM and GNSS guidance; but you specify where you want it to go and the guidance system attempts to minimize or counteract outside influences), weapons that can independently follow a very specific instruction(at least the simpler acoustic and IR seekers where you need to point them toward a particular loud/bright object but they can compensate for it moving, to a degree); and finally the ones that can take fairly generalized instructions of the "anything that looks like a target in this area" flavor; which seemed like the best candidates for 'autonomous'.

You are correct to recognize that cell phones don't work well for a bunch of reasons as the cause. But your causes suffer some of the same problems. In particular, fertility rates are going down throughout the world, and have been since the 1970s, while almost everything you've listed is US specific in the last 30 years.

I realize that it's a better hype piece if we assume that the 157000 'agents' are fancy chatbots; but this is just an HTTP API; on what basis are they distinguishing between 'agents' in the currently trendy sense and someone's little script around cURL or whatever?

Plug is standardized, but everything else is not.

The "get the specific app if you want to charge" is a very real problem here. As is "shit is broken". From app back end to chargers. All of this is very real.

I, for one, completely trust this objective and disinterested report from a company that has no stake in the ease of ramming datacenter approvals through.

You know the old saying: believe half of what you read, none of what you hear, and the opposite of what you see on the internet.

Nope. Not even one little bit. There are plenty of concerns, mostly about the fact that these things kill indiscriminately, opening the possibility for this weapon to commit a war crime (even when the operator had no such intention). But that doesn't make them a war crime in themselves.

Those are not the same. The drones in Davydov's video are piloted, the operator selects the target, then engages Auto mode for the terminal flight. That's designed to get around the electronic warfare stuff carried on some vehicles, and because the radio signal tends to degrade rather a lot the closer you fly to the ground.

The drones in this test are fully autonomous hunter-killers. The drone flies to the designated area, finds and selects the target, then goes after it. It offers advantages over the drones with Auto mode: no operator is required (saving manpower, which Ukraine is short on) or endangered by having to sit in a forward base near the front (saving lives).

Next step is to make these things loiter. Perch on a building and keep looking for movement; with a decent battery they might watch an area for a couple of days.

You gave Ukraine security guarantees in exchange for Ukraine not keeping the nuclear weapons that were on its soil after the breakup of the USSR. There's an argument that the real mistake the US (and the UK and France) made was not getting involved in 2014 when Russia decided to unilaterally revoke Stalin's transfer of the Crimea to the Ukraine. The resulting lesson, which is also the lesson that the current war in Iran teaches, is that a state should do all it can to acquire nuclear weapons and then not give them up under any circumstances.