Yeeees and no. It matters in terms of loans he can get from banks. A trillionaire gets an awful lot better deal than anyone else.

So although he cannot liquidate a trillion dollars, there's a decent chance he can borrow at exceptionally low interest rates enough to do pretty much whatever he wants because he has the moniker.

It's not hard to be morally superior to a childish self-righteous socipoath.

He's not bright, he's not clever, he IS abusive, and he is exceptionally rich. However, only an idiot equates "rich" with "better".

I would say more than half of Slashdot can match or exceed his intelligence. And that's despite the fact that Slashdot has attracted pet rocks as users in recent years. Actually, truth be told, it's because of that. Back in the younger days of Slashdot, I'd say 95% of the regulars were smarter than Musk.

All Musk has is money. And I can understand you envying that. But here's the thing. Smart people don't talk their company's value down. Smart people invest their money. Musk throws it around, such as buying Twitter and destroying the userbase.

Musk is not your friend.

Some people are already trying to have robots controlled remotely by people where labour is cheap. They don't work very well, but will get better.

Cheap medicines was what patents and regulatory capture were supposed to prevent, but for stuff like cancer it's worth the patient just going to a better country for treatment, and it's hopefully a one-off so higher prices back home don't matter.

World population is levelling off around 11-12bn, which is sustainable with modern farming methods. The main reason it continues to grow is increased lifespan, so there are more generations alive at once.

Smart motorways are where most of the variable limits are, that's why I mentioned them.

The problem is that too often they cry wolf. You get a 20 limit, or even a full stop, on a motorway due to some dire risk ahead. But then it turns out there was nothing, or a car drove the wrong way down a slip road for a few seconds before realizing and turning around.

Many people ignore it, so if you do 20, or stop, you have people zooming past at dangerous speeds and risk being hit. The police can't really prosecute you for ignoring it, because your defence will be that it was unsafe due to everybody else also ignoring it.

Much more common is the random 50 limit for no reason, or they forgot to take the signs away after finishing work, or they left the signs up for months before coming back to finish something off. It undermines the whole system and people who do the route regularly and know there are no cameras ignore the limits. The whole thing needs a re-think.

I think you can self host it. It's something that many orgs want, hence the popularity of Office 365 or whatever Microsoft calls it these days. Makes centralized management and backup easy.

Thing is even Microsoft Office doesn't have very good compatibility with Microsoft Office. Opening documents from older versions often just breaks them. I've had documents from hospitals that I couldn't get to render right in modern Microsoft Word, and spreadsheets from ancient projects that broke when imported into the Office 365 web version of Excel.

There is a reason why many orgs, especially legal outfits, want PDFs.

I've been sending people .odf files for a while now, and not had any issues. I don't use a lot of advanced features, and MS Office seems to read them well enough for my needs.

This keeps happening with every new forensic technique that comes along. Fingerprints, DNA, photographs, CCTV, handwriting analysis, audio recording verification from power line timing, computer image matching, it always gets abused and people always suffer until courts get wise to it and rules are made and precedents set.

There needs to be a general rule for all new technologies that they are very carefully monitored and controlled, until the limitations are understood and demonstrably accounted for by law enforcement when acting.

When birth rates are up in the high single digits, the reduction is due to education, women's rights, and improved healthcare. When it gets down to around 2, it starts to become the cost of living instead.

This is the biggest challenge that developed nations are facing. Either we retool our economies to cope with population decline, or we accept higher levels of immigration, or we do something drastic to increase the birth rate.

Increasing the birth rate without forcing women to have children can only really be done by making parenthood much more attractive. That means a greatly reduced cost of living, and lots of support for parents (financial, government/subsidized services).

The elephant in the room is climate change. It's getting worse and we aren't going to avoid major upheaval. It's not surprising that people are somewhat reluctant to bring children into a world that is going to be seeing that kind of strife.

And it all boils down to billionaires don't want to share so they make sure none of this stuff can happen.

The UK has been trying to do something like that, but it isn't going well.

Our "smart" motorways convert the hard shoulder (the outermost lane that was used as a stopping area for broken down vehicles) into a normal lane, and then adds sensors (radar, cameras) to detect stopped or slow vehicles and reduce speed limits. Unfortunately it didn't work very well and people died, so they started adding regular "refuge areas", which are basically little stopping points every half mile or so, off to the side of the road. The idea being that most breakdowns allow the vehicle to get at least half a mile to the next refuge. It seems to have reduced the deaths, but that outermost lane still feels unsafe to me.

Again, it doesn't have to be perfect. Something must be done, this is something.

And while I am still working on OpenWater and Alignable, the only thing I've gotten from LinkedIn in the past year is rewrite-your-resume scams

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.