They've had 22 years to figure this out, but now it's a crisis requiring a rush mission because nobody thought it was important enough to do something a year ago, or five, or ten.

The problem isn't the population. Bedrock can handle more than that. London isn't sinking because of all the people (and London is huge!), it's sinking because the ice sheet that pressed the Highlands deep into the crust has been gone for the last 10,000 years, resulting in the entire island tilting back to where it naturally should be. You could move London's population into the Great Glen and it would not make the slightest difference - London would still be sinking. The ice sheets were a whole lot heavier than a few tens of millions of people.

(Ok, it would make a difference. If the rich people actually lived in Scotland, the transit system and public services would see a thousand percent improvement inside a week. If they were also forced to speak Gaelic, English would vanish in a month.)

Aquifers can be deep. The aquifer that supplies the town of Buxton in England is so deep that it takes rainfall 5,000 years to rech it.

Every place? Fascinating.

There are towns in England and Wales that have been occupied for the past 10,000 years. Manchester isn't the greatest place on Earth, but I'm really not convinced it's going to start sinking into the ground any time in the next thousand years. If "short term" is longer than the remaining lifespan of the human race, I am not convinced "short" is really the right word.

"Short term" is only meaningful if it's shorter than the time needed to take meaningful remedial action, and the time it would take to remediate the problem in Mexico City vastly exceeds the time it will take for the city to crumble into oblivion.

The sun will not explode in 4 billion years. It's far too small. It might well run out of hydrogen by then, but that will simply cause it to swell. If, in four billion years, we can't find a way to drift the Earth outwards to remain within the goldilocks zone, then we're a failure as a species. Of course, we might well have built a Dyson Ring by then. Although, to be honest, if we were going to do that, we'd want to find a gas cloud that was about to form a stellar nursary and head there. If we arrive as the proto star fires up, we've maximum resources in the easiest possible form (a dust cloud, so no mining needed and minimal processing required), can build the Dyson Ring or Dyson Sphere by the time the star really gets going, and have another ten to fifteen billion years.

There would be some perverse irony if Apple ended up manufacturing cellular baseband hardware with designs from the cellular modem team that they bought from Intel, and did so using Intel's foundries.

The SSD would cost $10 but only the commissars would be able to buy them because they would always be out of stock everywhere else.

It's a good idea in principle. If Intel can actually catch up. Otherwise, it will be like the cellular modems, where Apple second-sourced from Intel, and the product was crap, so some devices had noticeably degraded performance compared with the ones that contained Qualcomm radios.

Except that they would have to presumably reengineer the old silicon for Intel's process, which kind of defeats the purpose of reusing old designs to save money, I would think.

I think you're on the right track with that one. Apple uses a lot of CPUs that aren't the main CPU. For example, every current MacBook Pro has a T2 security chip that handles encryption. The next generation of that could be designed to be manufacturable on multiple processes; it is currently built on a 16nm process.

Apple also uses CPUs in things like the Apple Watch, where absolute performance isn't as much of a factor as temperature and power consumption. I'm pretty sure Intel is already able to make chips in volume that beat the 4nm process that they use for those.

When the AI bubble bursts, the government will run a "Cash for Clankers" program where they buy all the old AI hardware and crush it so it can't wreck the market for new parts.

I remember years ago reading a post on some Microsoft techie's blog where he answered a question about why Windows did something in a weird way and it was apparently because it would break otherwise if you tried to do that thing on a system where the file you were trying to access was on actually a tape drive and had to be retrieved very slowly.

Also those tape drives appear to cost as much as a car. So not really good solution for regular users.

I installed a 28TB hard drive in my gaming PC to back up to. Man is that thing loud when you're used to a quiet PC with SSDs.

I checked prices a few weeks ago and discovered I couldn't even afford to replace that PC if it broke. It would cost as much as a small car.

All so the Internet can create funny cat videos.

I remember when I could buy 8TB SSDs for $499 (Canadian). It wasn't that long ago.

Now an 8TB hard drive costs almost that much.

That is true. So I guess that's another way to try to beat Moore's Law (or the lack of it).

Though the better the low-end models get, the less need for massive data centres as people can run them locally.

Don't forget Windows 11.

We had to buy two new PCs last year just because Windows 11 refused to run on the existing ones. That extra burst of sales is also over.