Humans are really, really good at looking at long term slow problems and solving them. ... About the only real world one that looks to be coming true is global warming, and even there we have made significant progress. Renewable energy sources are thriving.

What?!? Long term slow problems are the class we're spectacularly bad at solving! You mentioned global warming, not only are we not solving it (the average temp is rising faster than ever), but half of all Americans refuse to acknowledge that a problem even exists. Heck, our current president went out of his way to put barriers on renewable energy projects.

Massive wealth inequality? Situation is getting worse not better.

Insane prescription costs and medical bankrupcies? Situation is getting worse not better.

Race / religion / gender conflicts? Got better for a while, now the situation is getting worse.

General health of citizens? Got better for a while, now the head of Health and Human Services is anti-vaccine, and has pushed policy to force us all in that direction.

(disclaimer: I know this is a US-centric list, apologies to the rest of the world for my myopia. Hell, that might demonstrate another problem that won't ever be solved.)

A customer can also choose a £649 "lifetime" subscription, but that is tied to the car, not the individual. If you sell your car and buy another ID.3, you would have to pay the fee again.

I don't know, why wouldn't a "lifetime feature subscription" not be tied to the car? Should I expect a future, new car to automatically have features I had paid for on a previous car? What would be crappy is if the "lifetime" subscription goes away on the existing car if I sell it.

What would be worse is if VW didn't offer the option of a "lifetime" subscription to begin with. Think of a lifetime subscription as just a normal paid upgrade on a purchase, and seems pretty standard (to me, anyway).

Bicycle lanes are put in on main arteries with little thought as to how many people actually use them: In a city that experiences genuine winters when VERY few people actually use the bike lanes, it's more politics that dictates the extensive deployment of bike lanes on arteries, and less logic.

Are you saying bicycle lanes are a waste because they aren't used in the winter?

Sleeping with a thousand women versus getting bitten by hundreds of venomous snakes... hmm... yeah I'll go with the first option.

That depends, venomous snakes never try to ... claim they'll never bite someone else.

If you sleep with a thousand women, do you really have the high-ground to complain that *they're* sleeping with other people?

A Faraday bag with your phone would protect against tracking, because your phone will only be visible to the network when you are taking it out and making a phone call, which is much harder to track by monitoring the cell phone towers, and also shortens the time window for trying to sneakingly get into the phone.

Wouldn't this have the same effectiveness as putting our phone in airplane mode whenever you're not using it?

(rambling reply to myself)

Although, there's an interesting game-theory aspect if they did sell "super" tickets.

Due to the potential for selling more than one super ticket, they're not a safe bet: spending $300M to buy the $400M jackpot sounds good until you have to split it with the other orgs thinking the same thing.

But then other orgs would have the same worry, so if nobody else thought it was worth the risk then suddenly that $300M is money well spent. But other orgs would have that thought too.

I wonder if the emergent behavior would be that nobody would buy a super ticket because the risk of sharing is too great, or if some org would roll the dice practically every time?

what the lottery should do is offer a single "super" ticket, that is a guaranteed winner since it covers every possible combination...

Lottery ticket sales go way up as the jackpot goes up, so to maximize sales they want the jackpot to not be hit for as long as (reasonably) possible.

Having a mechanism where the jackpot resets as soon as it passes the break-even point would cause it to miss out on a substantial amount of revenue.

With initiatives already underway, the US is expected to be able to reach 50% of its own magnet production by 2026.

Are those initiatives federally subsidized? Because DOGE could have something to say about that...

Even the While House Press office agrees that this requires congressional action, which almost everyone agrees is not going to happen.

That technicality means less than nothing if congress won't assert its own authority regarding the changes.

Right now the congressional majority is a bunch of cowards who'd rather kowtow to the orange man than risk getting primaried in 2026.

Because who needs standard time zones? We should go back to a time where you needed books to figure out when your train would arrive because every kept to a different time schedule.

Standardization is one part of the government's responsibility. Everyone on the same page, not doing whatever they feel like.

My understanding is that right now states have 2 options: standard time year round, or DST with the start/end dates set by the feds. The feds could just as easily allow states a 3rd option, DST all year round.

This wouldn't blow up the time zones, and it would still have less impact than Arizona's situation (standard time in most of the state, but DST in Navajo Nation).

(Oh, and BTW, year-round DST is the right answer. I want more sunlight in the evening when I can enjoy it with friends and family.)

Dude, India and China account for over 40% of emissions, and they're up +197% and +242% over their year 2000 measurements. First world (which arguably is US, CA, EU, AUS, JP and a few middle east countries) account for ~28% and all their numbers have gone down in the last 23 years.(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions)

The 3rd world *is* the current problem and without a serious effort on the part of India and China this is all moot.

I'd like to see percentages tied to where products are going, not where they're manufactured. I mean, if India and China create 40% of the emissions, but two thirds of the emissions are from manufacturing of crap shipped directly to first-world countries, then the first-world countries aren't the innocent bystanders you'd make them out to be.

By analogy, if a mob-boss keeps paying to have people killed (but doesn't kill them himself), isn't he still part of the high-murder-rate problem?

She is not getting a pardon. Any more than Bernie Madoff is.

Bernie Madoff died in 2021.

America is a continent, not a nation. With the Gulf being shared by two countries in the Americas, calling it the Gulf of America seems perfectly fitting.

No, "North America" is a continent. Which means your perfectly fitting name would be Gulf of North America. But what are the odds of Trumpsters supporting that?

People are going to get sick and die, and when it gets bad enough they'll rediscover respect for vaccinations.

Trouble is, the wrong people are going to die. When diseases spread, children (who don't make the decision about their own vaccination) and people who can't vaccinate due to medical reasons will get thrashed. The healthy parents who are getting the benefits of vaxes they themselves received as children will mostly be fine.

A couple thoughts on this.

First thought:

It involved too much money trickling down from the wealthy to the working class. They wanted more of that money to trickle up. So they replaced it with a system that forces you to purchase stock on an ongoing basis, thus sending your money right back up into the coffers of the wealthy who control most of the economy

But the money was trickling up anyway- when the organization put money into a traditional pension fund, the money wasn't buried in a hole for 30 years, it was invested. Maybe invested in lower-yield but safer places, but invested nonetheless. So the wealthy coffers got their mitts on it either way.

Second thought is that traditional pensions had a serious design flaw. If the organization's part of the deal was just "pension pays X dollars after Y years", then the company had too much flexibility in putting seed money into the account. Eg:

- year 1: "based on a 3% annual growth rate, we need to put in Z dollars this year into the fund this year to keep pace with the target"
- year 2: "money's a little tight, but I think we'll get 3.1% annual growth rate so it's ok to put in less this year"
- year 3: "money's still tight, but the new tax laws will support a 3.2% annual growth rate. Let's put in less again"
...
- year 30: "they're retiring now, we'll go bankrupt if we actually have to cover the X dollars we promised. Federal government, you're our only hope!"