The important point is that the EU can now launch things into space from western Europe, it's home base if you like. Previously it was mostly French Guiana, on a different continent. For security reasons that wasn't ideal.

Correct, but most maps are not used for such navigation. They are used to teach children about the world, and to show adults where things are relative to other things. The distortion of sizes defeats those purposes, so it makes sense to campaign for more accurate maps.

The size of Africa in particular is something that surveys have shown non-Africans to regularly underestimate. The effects of that are debatable, but it is claimed that the potential of the continent and the variety it sports are also underestimated as a result.

Boomers did take a lot. They burned a lot of cheap fossil fuels and did very well out of it, leaving the mess for younger generations to clean up, for example. They enjoyed massive increases in wealth due to house prices going from 2-3x average income, to 12-13x. That won't be repeated, we won't have houses costing 30-50x average income in another few decades, it was a one-off benefit for them.

Mistakes were made. The assumption was that every generation would be bigger and wealthier than the last, but the opposite happened. In the UK we went from 14 working age people per pensioner in the 60s to 4 today, while the value of the state pension and the amount of healthcare they receive greatly increased. Because of at faulty assumption, it has become unsustainable and unaffordable.

I understand why they feel entitled now. They did what they were told was the right thing to do, and it worked well for them. They didn't vote out of malice to screw younger generations, they were just sold a fantasy. The problem is that they passed on the bad advice and it didn't work for their kids, and they are now unwilling to correct these mistakes out of their own pockets.

Unfortunately young people don't vote, at least not in high enough numbers for politicians to care. In any country where the system doesn't account for that, through things like mandatory voting or proper proportional representation where every vote counts, young people get screwed.

For example, in the UK the state pension has a "triple lock". It goes up by the higher of inflation, average wages, or 2.5%. Often that means it goes up more than wages, and the tax burden on working age people is now becoming unsustainable. It's politically impossible to get rid of it though, because pensioners vote in large numbers and most of them won't vote for it to be fairer.

Only if we can adjust our economies to cope with population decline. Otherwise the only people who will benefit are the already super wealthy.

At this point most of the population growth is people living longer, not births. More people alive at the same time, even as the birth rate declines.

The driver monitoring system is mandatory in new cars now, I think. Or at least it is if they want the highest safety rating. And they have to be on every time you start the car.

The better ones allow you to turn it off or tone it down, and the same with other safety features. MG, for example, lets you save which ones you want disabled, and turn them off with a couple of taps when you start the car. A physical button would be preferable, but I'm not sure if that is allowed.

I really enjoyed Coyote, it was funny and actually quite biting towards corporations at times.

Maybe next time they try to get a tax write off the taxman can challenge it on the basis that the movie actually would make more money than it cost to produce.

We tend to look at Japanese vehicles are durable and reliable. The Hilux is legendary for being nigh on indestructible. There was a British TV show that put one on the roof of a tower block and demolished the tower, then threw it in the sea, and with some new spark plugs it was still working.

At the rate Chinese manufacturing is advancing, if they set one up in the US by the time it is built it would be mostly robots and a few people to keep an eye on them.

The main issue with trying to attract manufacturing to the US is that it is not a politically stable country. Even if Trump does abdicate at the end of his term, the reality for the past few decades has been policies lurching back on forth every 4/8 years. People don't want to invest in things like factories when in a few years the US government might decide you need to sell your business or that your product is a threat to oil producers or something equally catastrophic.

As a European my perception of US cars is that they are fairly crap. A few models make it here and don't compare well to European brands. They tend to be impractical and inefficient. The EVs are half arsed.

Here Chinese brands are competitive, but our domestic manufacturers are making the effort and doing okay with it. Funny how when Chinese brands started gaining traction the European built EVs started getting 10k+ taken off the price, and still sold at a profit.

It is sound quality. CDs can be ripped perfectly and 99.999% don't have any DRM. The ones that do are defective.

The reason vinyl sometimes sounds better is because it can't be so loud. Around 1990 mastering engineers started using compression heavily. Compression makes quiet sounds louder - it compresses the dynamic range. That's what creates that "wall of sound" effect that is so common now.

CDs let you do extreme compression and it sounds awful. Vinyl limits what can be done because if you go too far the needle jumps out of the track, or the track walls aren't thick enough to be manufactured. They have to do a different, less loud master for vinyl, and so despite the additional noise on that format, the overall sound is much more pleasant and engaging. Drums have proper slam instead of sounding flat, you can pick out individual instruments, and the vocals aren't buried.

This sounds an awful lot like the rhetoric that was spread about Jews before WW2, and which was used as the justification for the Final Solution.

To add some context, this false claim about London no longer being full of "native Brits" is... Well, if you add up all the people who identified as British at the 2021 census, it's 71.1%. It's just that only about 39% of them are white. There are lot of Black and Asian (which in English means from India, Pakistan, and countries in that region, not East Asian countries like China) British citizens there too. Lots of mixed race, because non-racist white Brits form relationships with non-white Brits.

That's why the far right in the UK has pivoted to talking about "native Brits". When you ask them exactly what that means, they tell you it's white with a long lineage of white ancestors in the UK. That would exclude our king, and one of our most famous Prime Ministers, Winston Churchill, as well as many other notable British people. They rely on people not thinking that hard about it.

So TL:DR it's a racist dog whistle.