The "connected home"-type applications are not where the value is. The big value is in areas like the supply chain, manufacturing, agriculture, retail - most industries could remove significant waste with access to IoT-style data.

The main difference is sheer numbers. None of its predecessors had this many users, and we don't know if there is a tipping point where network effects become large enough to sustain such a site for a much longer period.

You'd think they would've learned from UPS and FedEx losing all those trucks and packages.

The true irony is that this is effectively saying that the hiring process at the company is no better than random chance - i.e. HR is not adding any value to it.

Drinking or taking "recreational drugs" allow to momentarily hide problems by reducing the amount of thoughts, but when the relaxed state vanishes, the problems appear more acute and one feels even more miserable.

That comes with a huge YMMV. Lots of people simply do it to have fun, not to escape anything.

The station doors are only at underground stations though, overground stations are just like normal ones.

LG has wire form batteries in their pipeline, which would enable the entire wristband to be a battery (assuming heat can be controlled). That could easily equal the volume of many smartphone batteries. Processing power is another matter though.

I absolutely agree that we have only seen the tip of the iceberg in white collar job automation. However, many of those jobs were already offshored, so I think the effects once management catches up will be even more profound in places like India and the Phillipines.

*A* pollutant, for which we had replacements ready to go (if slightly more expensive). This is on an entirely different scale.

The reduction goals in Europe are also going to be hard to achieve. The cap-and-trade system has all but broken down, which has removed all incentive for industry to reduce emissions, and Germany is moving from nukes to coal and gas. The European goals are also only half the story, as a significant contributor to EU reductions is industry moving or leaving - which is in most cases highly likely to lead to a net increase in global emissions.

e-cigarettes are also growing explosively right now (on track to becoming a $1B industry this year), and there are already tons of luxury products in that category. I think that will take over almost all cigarette use (in the West), and pipes and cigars will become even more niche than they are already. Barring legislative shenanigans from the neo-puritan crowd, of course.

Europe varies vastly in the use of paper money. The Nordics, helped in no small part by the lack of a tipping culture, tend to use cash less than the US. Generally the further south you go, the more popular cash is - with the UK as an outlier. Anyway the whole thing is about to change with mobile payments that my only prediction is these will be too disruptive for us to make predictions beyond 10 years.

I don't really need one since my point is that even if we assume it is absolutely correct and effective, there's no way to actually make it happen in practice.

I conclude it is fucked because there is absolutely nothing in the history of mankind to indicate that we're able to come together across nations, races, religions and tribes and sacrifice for each other (and especially for the future) on the scale that would be required to make a meaningful dent in emissions.

It also seems I may not have been clear - I'm talking about practical mitigation of the effects of warming, not warming itself. Seawalls, finding new farmland, resizing drainage in cities and such. That's what we should be looking at now. We're in complete agreement on why it's hopeless to spend scarce resources on prevention of warming.

A big problem with climate change is that it responds so very slowly. Even if we somehow magically stopped all emissions by 2020, we would still be facing increased global temperatures and rising sea levels for a century or more. As it is, the earliest we could probably hope to significantly cut emissions (at least without addressing population growth) is likely closer to 2050, at which point many of the adverse effects will already be in full swing. So even in the best case we need to start working on our mitigation of the effects today.

Also, while hope might spring eternal, I honestly don't think a deal will ever become politically possible. Nobody is ever going to come out and tell 5 billion poor people that they'll just have to stop trying to better their lives, for everyone's sake. And no matter how many people die from GW-related effects, precious few will give up their steaks, their plane trips, their 19C house temperatures etc. Any politician who tries to force them to will be voted out ASAP.

Build dikes and seawalls, plan for evacuation and rehousing, create higher elevation farmlands where lower elevations may be flooded, plan for droughts and emergency irrigation, resize drainage in cities to cope with increased rainfall, improve natural disaster response and legislation... there's plenty of things that could be done today to prepare for tomorrow. Knowing people though, most countries won't start until it becomes truly urgent.