And the pyramids still stand today. How important would you say Egypt is in the world?

The group of proudly ignorant people have grown in size, but they are still a tiny minority. Only approximately 3.5% of US children are unvaccinated.

As for universities, their biggest problem is declining enrollment due to demographics. There's also Trump's anti-immigrant policies blocking foreign students, who are cash cows for the universities. But those policies are very likely to be reversed in 3.5 years.

Basic science for sure. Applied science is still mostly funded by private businesses, so we probably won't see much change there. China will probably climb past us at some point, but that is inevitable given they have 4 times as many people as we do, and not every administration of theirs will be less pro-science than ours.

Any system that is still in testing doesn't count. Otherwise you're comparing who makes the best press releases and can lie with a straight face. I mean, according to Elon's own estimates, the first SpaceX rocket should've landed on Mars in 2018, and the first human in 2024. In reality, Starship hasn't even reached LEO.

Aircraft wings are very much multi-part components. They can repeatedly withstand 2.5 g stress at 600 km/h. If the airflow is stable, they can easily sustain 1000 km/h.

You do lose strength near a joint, but you can make up for it with a bit more material.

I think we can definitely blame Trump for cancelling billions of investments in clean energy. Energy that we will actually need if we want to bring manufacturing back and compete with the likes of China.

The issue with trade imbalance complaints is that a country trades with more than just one other country. They might be running a surplus against the US, but they almost certainly are running a deficit with somebody else. Otherwise their currency would appreciate dramatically.

Also, completely missing from the trade discussion is services. The US exports a lot of services, which is part of the reason the US dollar remains quite strong.

I mean, you can always just get it shipped: https://www.hawaiicoffeecompan...

Financial gains are taxed at 0% if you don't sell it. 15% if you do. Wages are taxed at anywhere between 17-55% if you count the employer's share as well.

On the budget side, more than 80% of the federal government income is from individual income and payroll taxes.

The government does everything it can to discourage people from working, discourage employers from hiring and encourage them all to speculate on financial assets. We shouldn't be surprised at the result.

Now do this with the Japanese stock market.

They're expecting the tariffs to backfire spectacularly. Then they can say they never had anything to do with it.

Many simulations have been run to try to understand what would happen if we stop emitting CO2. They do show a continued warming trend for a period afterwards. However, the warming does eventually come to a stop. That final temperature is what you usually hear in media reports.

Personally, I'm of the opinion that we should explore all possibilities to bring it to a stop even more quickly. Atmospheric aerosol injections can very quickly end warming, though it does not mitigate all other effects of higher CO2. Ocean fertilization can absorb the CO2 at a rate much faster than any industrial CO2 capture process, but comes with the risk of ecological disaster.

Of course, even if they work, they cannot overcome our burning of fossil fuels, especially not coal. So that must be the first step.

Most countries don't do that though. Even China only x-rays your luggage. No need for shoes or body scan. A high speed train is simply much more resilient than an aircraft against small explosives.

In this respect it's similar to the airport, except that most people are significantly closer to the city center than they are to the airport. Of course the other half of the problem is that the US is seriously lacking in intra-city public transport as well. In Tokyo, you could take a 10 minute subway ride to the train station. The airport, on the other hand, is almost an hour away.

You only need to wait around for the train if you didn't bother buying the ticket beforehand. If you did, you could show up 15 minutes before departure.

With commercial flights, if you tried showing up without a ticket, you would be denied entry completely. If you try to buy it right outside the airport, you're going to wait half a day if not several days for a flight. And this is if you are willing to pay out exorbitant prices for a last minute ticket.

The Holy Trinity of climate denial:

1. It's not happening.

2. Even if it's happening, the problems are exaggerated.

3. Even if the problems are bad, there's nothing we can do about it. (You're here)

There isn't enough airport or air traffic control infrastructure to support millions of private planes either.

As for the environment, you can definitely do worse by traveling on Starship once Elon figures out how to stop it from exploding.

In places like Japan and China, trains leave every 10 or 15 minutes. They go from city center to city center and 300 km/h makes up a lot of time. If you're talking about Dallas to Denver, that's a 12 hour drive, compared to what would be a 4 and half hour train ride.

Compared to flying commercial, your total travel time includes time needed to go from your house to the airport. You're having to arrive an hour and a half early. Then when you arrive, the Denver airport is a 30 minute drive from the city itself. Renting a car might take another 30 minutes. If you have baggage, you might also have to wait for it to show up at the carousel. Not to mention the price for both carry-ons and checked bags. So in the end, you're paying significantly more for a more cramped seat and arriving not too much sooner than a train.

As for private aircraft, most people will never be able to afford something like that. Nor is it a viable option even if it somehow becomes very cheap. There's simply not enough facilities for millions of small aircraft. There are also no small airports in the city center, so you still have the last mile problem.