His comment is reasonable, but I don't understand what it has to do with demoralization.

Boomers were the "me" generation, but the kids who followed them are definitely greedier.

2,400 acres x (43,560 square feet / acre) = 104,544,000 square feet
104,544,000 square feet / (5280 feet / mile) = 19,800 square miles
sqrt(19,800 square miles) * sqrt(19,800 square miles) = 140.71247279 x 140.71247279

So that's a block 140.71247279 miles on a side (someone recheck my math)

Texas has 268,596 square miles, so 268,596 square miles / 19,800 square miles = 0.07371666 of Texas land mass, so roughly 7 percent of Texas land mass.

I'm dubious. Of course the project will only sit on that land, not that land entirely covered in solar panels.

It doesn't say they got arrested, but apparently the person in question didn't turn off the Bluetooth device when asked to. Ignoring or disobeying the instructions of flight attendants is a federal offense.

There were movies but they weren't very good.

From the 1700s, Magic lanterns had moving parts, and there were magic lantern shows.

The Phenakistoscope was a kind of simple movie, and was projected on a stage by the mid 1800s.

The Zoopraxiscope was used with a projector from 1880 in public lectures. It is of interest because it used actual photographs.

The Kinetoscope was a little later, by 1892.

If your company relies on "oral tradition" to maintain documentation, then your company may not survive with or without AI.

"Oral tradition" is the engineering process of knowledge being lost. That is to say it's not engineering.

Maybe he should have made a backup earlier.

I get that there was probably a panicy passenger, but given 4.5 hours to land if they turn around or 4 hours to land if they continue to their destination and nothing but water under them either way, they may have actually prolonged the situation slightly by turning back.

If you wash away the salt deposits, that implies using water and thus generating brine. Brushing the salt away might be better. Main thing would be avoiding losing the salt to precipitation, as the idea seems to be to avoid it returning to the ocean.
Figuring out how to economically purify the salts, including separating out the lithium, would be a neat trick.

They were half way there. It made no sense to turn around at that point.

Maybe he thought it was off.

Not only did they panic over a poorly chosen Bluetooth device name, they turned around AT or just past the halfway point, apparently to maximize the damage and inconvenience. They could just as well have continued as normal and sorted it out at the destination.

How about perform an exploratory laparotomy just in case you implanted a bomb?

I doubt it rises to that level. The device had a name that happened to be Bomb. Yelling FIRE is a specific communication of a dangerous condition.

The bluetooth name has nothing to do with security. It is more likely that MattsSpeaker is a bomb than the thing named BOMB. Any number of things with no bluetooth or bluetooth turned off are also more likely to be a bomb than the bluetooth thing called BOMB.