You don't go far enough. Fighting and control to what end? Much of the fighting is sheer competition to grab more. More land and resources, to support more children. As for fighting, no, most people have the sense not to willingly risk their lives in deadly combat. Most would rather move into empty lands, or failing that, clear out the current occupants through genocide. If easy genocide is not possible either because the occupants can and will fight back, some will choose war, but only if it looks easy.

Religion is rather orthogonal to this. Been used as much or more to justify fighting as to discourage fighting.

Reselling is definitely shady. But there would be no scope for such schemes if the price was fair. It's not.

The legendary Robin Hood robbed from the rich and gave to the poor. Was he wrong? Was his cause not worthy? He was fighting greed-- excessive, damaging taxation and hoarding of wealth. Today, greed has again arisen to become one of our biggest problems, with these super rich using their immense wealth to corrupt our systems to unfairly direct even more wealth to them.

Your use of the term "thief" prejudices your argument. Copying is not theft. Copying is copying. Pirating a TV signal, maybe that should be a crime, but it shouldn't be lumped in with theft. For years, the entertainment industry has been trying to convince the world that sharing is theft. Don't do their dirty work for them.

Yes, I am aware TorrentFreak ran the story. They are one of the few exceptions to the near universal censoring and propagandizing the media does on this issue.

Society must acknowledge that sharing of info should be encouraged, and be thankful that technology has made sharing incredibly easy. Need to work harder on systems that can fairly compensate producers while encouraging sharing, not continue to base compensation on the restriction of sharing. Especially not to the point of outlawing sharing and wasting resources enforcing that and causing still more waste of lives that have to spend ruinously to fight to defend themselves from the legal mess.

One thing that makes this issue most intractable is that the organs who report on it are thoroughly convinced that sharing is contrary to their own interests. How is the public to hear unbiased reporting on this matter when no one with a metaphorical megaphone will give one?

I looked into bringing a Mexican car (the Ford Ka) into the US. You will be forced to bring it up to US safety standards. Strengthen the B pillar, pad the dash more, etc. The extra weight will destroy the fuel economy and the performance, as well as cost thousands to do. Not worth it.

Sounds like you say "communist" as if that's a bad thing. Like in the Red Scare in the 1950s.

You love Texas, eh? Well, I don't like that so many have supported the most blatantly incompetent, bigoted, racist, cheating, lying, riot inciting, traitorous anti-American president ever. Jan 6, 2021! Jan 6, 2021! Jan 6, 2021 -- a day that will live in infamy! Texas, and every other state that did so, should be ashamed to have given its electoral votes to such a monstrous villain, especially in 2024 after he attempted a coup.

And that ain't no reality denying summation either, that's a fact that what is currently squatting in the White House is a horrible villain, to our peril, dishonor, and shame.

A lot of people are refusing to call a spade a spade. Social media has enabled these reality deniers to connect and cohere their delusions so that they agree on many of the same wrong things. Social media and media in general have further inflamed things by overdramatizing, in order to increase their revenue. Media is holding megaphones up to the stuff that is the craziest.

It's not "polarization" when some groups are refusing to accept reality, and further, pushing dark false narratives that conveniently and motivatedly but very unfairly blame other groups for their troubles, real and imagined, and propose murder and war as solutions, exactly like the Final Solution. That's evil.

I have never liked the "mother may I" copyright system. What matters is that creators receive compensation, not that creators have total control. The control was supposed to be nothing more than a lever for authors to obtain payment.

But as usual, commercial interests have confused the issues to construe them to their advantage. Copyright is more powerful and controlling when it is their work, and less powerful when it is someone else's work.

How about we put this much hyped AI to good use by employing it to automatically shut the door in such cases?

While we're at it, I could use an AI robot dishwasher that can actually clean pans, determining whether to use scouring powder and then use it or not, and position dishes itself, no more need for the user to carefully position everything, just dump the dirty dishes in the machine.

Too bad all the hoopla around AI was hype, and AI still can't do such simple things.

For many years, hypermilers have known many ways to do just that. The problem is that these ways are being ignored. I find this most exasperating. All this whining about range, but as soon as you improve the aerodynamics and thus the range, you get even louder whining about the supposed ugliness of the looks. The early 2000s Honda Insight is the most recent car I know of that has "skirts", wheel well covers. Dimples like on golf balls also help, and you don't want them all over, only on trailing edges. The Corbin Sparrow, an obscure electric vehicle, is the only one I know of that used dimples along the trailing edges. I suggested that truck trailers could use dimples, and this one idiot I knew even complained about that being ugly, as if he cared about the looks of grey boxes.

Worst of all on the aero is the refusal to cover the underside. Most people don't like driving around without a hood, but it's okay to have all this machinery and support hanging from the underside, in the open and creating more drag.

Another "duh" to save fuel is weight reduction. Weight snowballs, too. More weight means the car needs a bigger engine, which adds more weight, which forces the engine bay to get heavier to support that weight, which of course adds still more weight. One line that's nice to be on the good side, is light enough to not need power steering.

Seriously? You have neighbors open carrying in the hopes that they can scare you or worse? Well, I would be scared. Apart from their hostile intentions, I wouldn't trust them to handle firearms safely. Is there nothing you can do about it? No rules against what they're doing? Can you sue them for, I don't know, creating a threatening environment? Harassment, maybe? Perhaps they have been in trouble with the law in the past, and for that reason have no right to bear arms.

The hype, and fear, over current AI is wildly overblown. Perhaps there are too many stories of computers magically acquiring sentience somehow, for instance, in the Terminator movies. I suspect we've grossly underestimated what it takes to achieve real, general intelligence.

Being able to play chess better than any person, ever, is not enough, not even close. All that chess computers have really shown us is that chess is amenable to brute force computation. Ought to have known that all along. Some scientists really hoped that the ability to play chess would translate into or perhaps derive from general intelligence.

Driving a car is another task that's been touted as AI. Not only is the way they do it not intelligent, they can't even do it reliably. They don't understand that they are driving a car, they only respond to visual stimuli. They go wrong in ways that a human would never go wrong.

And finally, these LLMs. LLMs are not in the least intelligent. They merely bandy words, they don't understand them.

The way OpenAI is behaving is so typical of these kinds of businesses. Exaggerate the capabilities of their products to the point of lying, as Tesla did with the self-driving they sell. Try to silence employees, to keep those lies from being exposed. As to the "serious risks", these are not risks that AI is going to get loose, no, these are risks that potential customers are going to believe the hype, and get hurt when the stuff can't perform at the level of expectations the sellers sold everyone on. Again, Tesla's self-driving is a case in point. When Tesla's AI misses, sometimes people die.

They've known since the 1970s

And this further establishes that corporations are soulless, wantonly careless of harm in the pursuit of profit. Lot of historic examples. Big Tobacco, insecticides and herbicides such as DDT, the Radium Girls, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and more recently the Rana Plaza building collapse in Bangladesh. The mining industry is notorious for killing their own workers as well as innocent bystanders and dumping huge messes on public lands for everyone to clean up. Problematic plastics include the bisphenols, not just A, but also S, and the phthalates. We're also learning that micro and nanoplastics are now in our bodies. Time and time again, we learn that the manufacturers did know of the problems, and chose to bury and deny.

The worst of all may prove to be Big Oil. The many oil spills they've caused through their recklessness may well be a footnote to the CO2 they've helped dump into our air. When someone cries that the world may end, usually they can be ignored. But this one could be a civilization killer. If Global Warming gets so bad that the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets collapse, it will cause massive change we are not ready to handle. It won't be just Big Oil that gets blamed, it'll also be the nations that allowed it, and the very system of capitalism. It most certainly will be a casus belli. It will disrupt food production. Billions of starving people is a recipe for disaster. The pressures pushing us all into war may be irresistible, and then our civilization and our very survival will be in doubt. And sea level rise may not be the worst calamity. Ocean acidification is another bad problem. Some of the worst case scenarios, which I sincerely hope are highly unlikely, are that this starts the Earth on a runaway greenhouse warming trend that ends up killing all life, oceans all boiled away.

Don't dismiss these possibilities as Chicken Little screaming that the sky is falling. None of us living now may live to see who called this correctly. Even if the predictions of doom turn out to be wrong, it's one hell of a chance to take, and for what? So that a few rich liars can get a little richer.

If you knew anything about hypermiling, you'd know that manufacturers are very far from squeezing "every bit of fuel efficiency out of the vehicle". On efficiency, a whole bunch of low hanging fruit still hasn't been picked. For instance, just look at the underside of pretty much every car in existence. It should be smooth, for better aerodynamics. It's not. The average user wouldn't think of doing without a hood, but never gives the underside of the vehicle a thought. Another even easier aerodynamic enhancement is vortex generators on the trailing edges, like the dimples in a golf ball. But people think that's ugly.

USian cars in particular also suffer from unnecessary weight from oversized engines, and weighty safety features of dubious value, and these things snowball a bit. For instance, because of all the extra weight, the car needs powerful power steering, which adds even more weight. In the US, a 2 liter engine is regarded as kinda shrimpy. In South America, 2L is a big engine,

One area they have improved on is lower RPMs. Into the 1980s, with an automatic being only a 3 speed, it was common for high gear not to be high enough, causing the engine to burn more fuel to run at higher RPMs than necessary. This also caused more wear on the engine. But the manufacturers liked that, as it meant more business for them. With those automatics came that abominable torque converter that threw away 20% of the power output of the engine, until manufacturers finally started adding a mechanical connection. Those fruits have been picked, but it took too much arm twisting and too long to do it, thanks to manufacturers fighting such improvements every step of the way.

Always good to hear from those with actual experience. My own experience is limited to a 2011 Nissan Leaf I bought used, to learn for myself the pitfalls of EV ownership. I am decent at hypermiling, and have pushed that Leaf up to 4.1 miles per kWh (.244 kWh/mile), but this is almost all on city streets, rarely exceeding 40 mph. I doubt it can manage .270 kWh/mile if I go 70 mph. Teslas are, if not #1 in efficiency, among the top 5. I can confirm what I've read elsewhere, that for the Leaf (and probably all cars) there is significant increase in range (about 20%) from slowing to 30 mph instead of going 40 mph. That basic technique for extending range has on at least one occasion made the difference between running out of charge before I made it home, and making it home.

194 miles of usable range? Okay, so on a long trip, let's say you manage 200 miles between charges. 200 miles at 70 mph, then sit for half an hour to fast charge to 80%. (Assuming that finding a charging station is not a problem, which may be too much of an assumption.) That works out to 3 hours 21 minutes to cover 200 miles. So, 10 hours and 3 minutes to cover 600 miles. A typical gas burner goes 300 miles between refuelings, and refueling takes perhaps 10 minutes. At the same 70 mph speed, the gas burner needs just under 9 hours to cover that same 600 miles.

Okay, so the Tesla can do a road trip, but it's a little slower. If it is 150 miles between rechargings, then the Tesla would need an additional charging session to cover that 600 miles, making it 10 and a half hours. That's closing in on the straw that breaks the camel's back, so to speak. The trip that can barely be done in one day in a gas burner, but can't be done in one day in a Tesla, is a problem. Having to spend an extra night in a motel room is a deal breaker.