In most 3rd world countries, the main problem in interior pollution, from cooking fires, candles, etc. The best fix for that is electrification.

Indeed. It will likely end the same way all other productivity improvements have ended throughout history: With greater prosperity and rising living standards.

They cannot die soon enough. 95% of my mail is paper spam that goes straight into the trash. The rest is either packages (that could go by UPS instead) or bills from Luddite companies that are too dumb to figure out how to save money by sending e-bills.

I haven't sent or received a personal letter in over a decade. Why would anyone prefer that over email?

How about zero days a week? That would save even more.

Plenty of countries no longer have a government run postal service. They are doing just fine.

Simulated annealing, which is used to solve a huge number of optimization problems. It is very compute intensive, and is often run on GPUs. If the claimed speed up is real, that would be a really big deal.

No, we don't do that ... but if we did, we would almost certainly make faster medical progress.

Number of people known to have been killed or harmed by NK's space program: 0.

How do you know? Do you have first hand knowledge, or are you just regurgitating the propaganda that your government has been spoon feeding you? Most of these stories come from defectors who have a strong incentive to lie and embellish. If everything defectors said was true, there would have been a WMD in every Iraqi backyard.

Engineering errors are not "political disloyalty". There is no evidence that NK punishes people for honest mistakes.

Not really. This is nothing new. Elon doesn't have a filter between his brain and his mouth. He thinks out loud. He spews a constant stream of idea and opinions. But he has made enough of his crazy ideas actually work that it would be foolish to dismiss anything he says.

There is no evidence whatsoever that NK has done that. That is just Western propaganda. They have deliberately chosen a "fail fast" strategy, and that doesn't work if you shoot your best engineers. Sure, Kim shoots people for political disloyalty, but that is an entirely different thing.

That is not the best strategy. It is better to push forward, take risks, and fail fast. You learn more from your failures than from your successes.

Look at North Korea, a poor impoverished country that has made huge strides by developing in fast cycles without worrying too much about failures. Their first rockets either blew up on the launch pad or shortly after liftoff. The world laughed. Yet they were ready to try again just a month or two later. That one blew up too, but it went further. Now, a few years later, they can put satellites in orbit, and they will soon have the technology for ICBMs that can reach North America. Nobody is laughing anymore.

We are born that way. By the time my daughter was 20 months old she would speak English to white or black people and Mandarin to Asian people. I never taught her that. She figured it out on her own.

The law bans active jamming of Wifi signals. That is not what Hofstra did. They just made a policy announcement. That is not the same thing at all.

Should it be illegal for movie theaters to have cellphone bans? How is this different?

No, the baby is not an immigrant. I was making a joke. The GPP's suggestion that families desiring healthy children should instead just support a more permissive immigration policy is so patently absurd that I didn't think it deserved a serious answer.

30 year old woman to boyfriend: I want to get married and have a baby.
Boyfriend: Sure, we could do that ... or we could just make a campaign contribution to Angela Merkel.
Woman: Okay, that would be fine, the end result is the same per capita GDP, and that's all that matters.

That is what I meant by "e-sign". They rejected it. They could tell because there were several pages requiring signatures, and they were all exactly the same. They can also tell by the size/speed of the transfer. If only the sig is a scanned image the transfer will be much smaller than if the whole page is rasterized.

As much as hospitals charge, do you seriously believe that they aren't staffed up enough to detect fax cheaters?

If you deal with governments, lawyers, or doctors, you still need to print stuff on paper. I emailed a form to my local hospital, and they called and said I had to fax it. So I "e-signed" it, and sent it with my fax card. They called again and said that they could not accept e-signatures, so I had to print it out, sign it with real physical ink, scan it back in, and then fax the image. That was two months ago, and I haven't used my printer since.

RTFA. This procedure is illegal in the USA, so the parents went to Mexico. This baby IS an immigrant.