Ha... I can't remember the last time I've seen elementary-age students *walking* to school. Even in perfectly nice weather in daylight. All the schools around here are traffic nightmares of each parent dropping off one student from a giant SUV.

I had to walk, but that was in the early 1980s.

Sunlight in the morning is relatively useless: most people are waking up, getting ready for work, and going to work, all of which can be done with artificial light.

Sunlight in the evening is valuable: people get off work and need to work in their yards, kids have after-school sports/activities, etc. outside, which are all either easier or only possible with sunlight.

Instead of destroying the cameras outright, it would be interesting to see if you could add another camera to the pole (either wire into the existing power source, or add your own solar). Now you have full control of footage from the same angle, and can either publicly release it, calming to be from the flock camera, or use it to target FOIA requests at other useful people.

If you get enough people in an area together, you can start to coordinate your small FOIA requests around where city officials are and/or don't want to be seen, and build a good picture of their behavior. Once you have a starting point for the mayor, and know what direction they were going, you can find other people in the group in the area at the same time, and put in additional FOIA requests until you have the whole route covered. Then start publishing their every movement.

Catch a few city council members at/near strip clubs, etc., and watch the cameras disappear.

Everyone does. Especially permanent anti-drone defenses.

The next war of aggression between physically adjacent countries will probably be drone blitzkrieg.

Imagine if Russia had already had a million cheap drones. Day one of the war would have seen 100,000+ launched all at once, targeting every piece of infrastructure in Ukraine, almost instantly rendering the country unlivable.

A patient enemy could pre-place thousands of Operation Spiderweb-esqe containers all over the US - using drones assembled in-country - and do the same thing here.

Treat the set date like a starting point, and make it so that any time that date field is accessed, it returns a random date between what you've set and one calculated based on the average human lifespan.

Give them some junk data to chew on.

As someone who grew up loving video games in the 80s (elementary and middle school aged then), it was a totally different situation than now. The games were more arcade-y, instead of designed to get you attention-addicted, and in order to use a game console, you had to share the one (in our case) TV in the house with everyone else, which severely limited available time.

When computer gaming started to become common in the late 80s/early 90s, you practically had to have a computer science degree to get some of those games to run on resource-starved PCs, and the problem analysis/solving skills that honed stood a lot of us in good stead for high-paying careers later on.

Wait, they require you to provide a phone number to get a phone number? So people who don't already have one can't ever get one? :P

Well, that kind of depends on whether or not you're the one that owns the capital...

This is why the fastest way to end the conflict after Putin's ICC arrest warrant was issued would have been for the US and/or EU to fund a $billion+ bounty to any group that delivered him to the ICC to face the charges. His own security would sell him out in days, and if not, he'd be so paranoid he probably couldn't function.

The math is pretty easy... even if you had 100,000 riders/day for 50 years, it would still cost over $120/day/rider to pay off the initial investment - that doesn't even count ongoing costs. If you're paying interest on $231B, those 100k riders at $120 won't even pay the interest. $300-400+ per ticket would probably be necessary, but no one's going to pay that.

I think the biggest technical problem is that I don't think people with that kind of "net worth" really personally own what gives them that worth. There's already a lot of incentives to not have assets in your name (protecting against lawsuits, divorce, etc.), so how many of these billionaires are actually penniless in a legal sense?

Basically, you could have billions in a checking account owned by a trust, and just be an "authorized user" on a credit card that some lawyer trustee pays off from the trust. Congrats! You have no wealth to tax.

They're certainly not going to break it out in the future, regardless of any threats. Any company that did has now created a specific liability, and could end up receiving tons of small claims cases if they don't refund. Companies that didn't can just claim they absorbed the cost, and don't owe anyone anything.

Even 4k is questionable when all most people do is stream. If I look at our 4k TV up close, "4k" streams really aren't.

PJM commits to keeping existing residential and business grids stable, and not increase their prices.

"Excess" users like AI data centers, crypto miners, etc. must bid once per day with a max price/kWh they're willing to pay. As long as there's no shortage, everyone pays normal rates, and it's fine. If they run out of capacity, then the excess users are shut off from lowest to highest.
For example, five AI data centers bid 10, 20, 30, 40, and 50c/kWh today. If capacity is low, the 10c DC gets shut off, and the rest pay 20c/kWh. If it's still not enough, the 20c/kWh is shut off, and the rest pay 30c/kWh, etc. Ties are not broken - everyone bidding the same gets shut down at the same time, even if it's not strictly necessary (this is to prevent collusion).
Then the ones causing the problem are the only ones that suffer, and the ones that can't make it economically will go somewhere else.