No. Physics knows pretty well where its limits are. But as Physics is an experimental science, we have to find a counterexample to our hypotheses to know their limits. This is one limit we didn't know before, as we did not find an example like this before. Apparently, the mass aggregation of Black Holes is not fully understood.

Other modes of transport are walking, cycling, street cars, cabs, busses, trains, ferries... It does not boil down to EVs vs. ICEs. For me, the automobile is the vehicle of choice only if all other modes are exhausted, because it's the most expensive mode. That does not change much if I go from an ICE powered car to an EV. In general, the automobile moves the most mass per passenger compared with all other modes of transport. It is horribly inefficient.

Still - it's two days in your average nuclear reactor.

On the other hand, Oklo is 1.7 billion years old, and any geological structure at that age is exceptionally quiet from a geological point of view. If this region was any more active, we would not have anything of Oklo left, except traces of it thousands of miles away. If you find 1.7 billion years old bedrock, it might be a good idea to store 10 pounds of nuclear waste in it - because that's the total mass deficit of U-235 recorded for Oklo. To put things in perspective, 10 lb of U-235, when spent, return 3.3 × 10^11 kJ of energy, which are about 90 GWh to heat water into steam, getting you about 35 GWh of electric power. A typical nuclear reactor produces about 7 TWh per year, which means that Oklo is equivalent to a commercial reactor running for about 2 days.

I am fine with storing 2 days worth of nuclear waste of a typical reactor in 1.7 billion year old bedrock.

Not at all. You are free to buy parts for an automobile abroad and mount them in Ethiopia, which is not exactly a car industry. What Ethiopia really wanted was banning the import of old cars, disposed for good in Europa, into Ethiopia, where they were somehow made running again and sold to the public, creating lots of fast moving accidents waiting to happen. The number of new cars imported into Ethiopia was miniscule anyway, and they were mostly high-end cars sold to the elite, and they find ways to import them privately.

It has a lot to do with the type of work people are performing. In Manufacturing, machines and plants are a big investment, and to get a better return on investment, you want to run them as often and as long as possible, leading to shift work. Some plants can't even be easily powered down like furnaces, and shift work is a necessity.

But most people in the U.S. are working in Services. Here, 9 to 5 jobs are much more common, because the tools are not the highest investment, but the education of the workers, who in turn are working only one shift per day. Additionally, a lot of the work is performed in contact with customers, which are also working in Services, and which are also on a 9 to 5 routine.

With more and more people working in Services, less and less people are working night shifts. https://news.slashdot.org/stor...

Probably yes, because at the same time, Solar is booming in Ethiopia, because you can set up a local grid completely independent from any nation wide power grid. And you can charge an EV locally, while Ethiopia can't produce any gasoline locally without importing oil. Solar panel are a one-time investment, which will last for decades. Oil is a recurring cost, and you have to have a network of roads and trucks to get it anywhere - all a non-issue with Solar.

No one forced EVs. It's just that the alternative, mainly clunkers from the scrapyards of Europe, are now banned. You are still able to manufacture your own internal combustion engine cars in Ethiopia.

It would be correct to say so, if you can prove that they have multipled in the last years.

The government has access to AI. A possible prompt would be "Create several terabytes of files about alien visitors on Earth and the methods how the government was hiding them."

I would reconsider my whole life choices and probably go in recluse somewhere in a monastery atop a mountain.

It increased production, not productivity. That are two different measurements.

The problem with all those productivity gains by IT is that they are mainly in the administrative part of production. Yes, you can churn out more reports per time. But no one can eat reports, live in reports, cloth himself with reports or build reports into a car. Actual productivity gains are industrial, not administrative. How much has IT improved the construction of houses? How much has IT improved the planting of food crops? How much has IT improved the weaving of fabric? IT improves the planning, the selling, the overview. But it is already challenged to improve the actual transporting of stuff from A to B. The last improvements here were the introduction of the standard container, the movement from steam to diesel for rail, and the 40 tonne semi truck. Everything else like fleet management and satellite navigation made transporting from A to B more easy, but not more productive.

Not exactly. If you read again, you will notice that places with higher Muslim population tend to retain more pubs. It's the places where not many Muslims live, where the pubs are closing.

But apparently, the pub closing rate is higher in places with less Muslim population. So your logic is somewhat flawed.

Which in this case is the same: Smaller density of Muslim population correlates with higher pub closing rates.