Your tax dollars are already subsidising the oil industry. Is that any better?

Two life-cycle things I have seen:

• Old EV batteries with reduced capacity have a useful second life for home electric energy storage, typically combined with solar panels so you can use the power when you need it.
• The Lithium can be recovered and used in new batteries, rather like the way lead-acid batteries are recycled for the lead, I guess.

Stories I've seen about battery technology improvements seem to be more about better Li-ion batteries than something completely different, so I don't think that will be a problem.

I suspect PHP continues to be popular because of apache2's mod-php. It's just too easy to use that instead of figuring out all the CGI/FCGI options to run Python or other language of choice.

PHP7.0 will continue to get security fixes on Debian Stretch for a year or two, certainly until after the next Debian release comes out.

Right about the wealthy elite, but unfortunately they are now so wealthy and powerful that the politicians and bureaucrats are in their pockets and cannot provide that defence.

They were garbage running Windows, but generally worked a lot better if you replaced that with a not-too-bloated Linux installation.

And I'd rather have xterm and mutt than a tablet for reading and managing email. But I guess that puts me in a minority...

That's not the point.

What the inequality of wealth brings is inequality of power. Those at the top of the food chain can make and enforce decisions that benefit them financially. They can get laws passed, tax breaks, government restrictions lifted and politicians elected to suit their needs, and the resultant damage to everybody else is worth far more than $100.

The best thing for EV batteries when they are no longer good for EV use is second life battery projects reusing them for less demanding applications like static energy storage. When they can no longer deliver bursts of high current they can still hold lots of charge and be useful for years, for example balancing supply and demand in a house running on solar electricity. Maybe after they're no good for that either they'll be worth dismantling and recycling.

Low cost devices that need a lightweight processor are well served by the lower end ARM core chips which don't do speculative execution and the other things that make them vulnerable to Spectre and Meltdown. The Cortex-m series aren't on the list of vulnerable CPUs, for example.

...whereas human drivers never do weird things?

Humans are susceptible to optical illusions too, and optical illusions have caused driving accidents. Not to mention other human failings.

Yes, Iridium certainly was still going a few years ago when I wrote some code to do FTP over it. (for data from unattended ice measuring equipment in Antarctica, the only way they could do it)

When just about every parking space has a charger (not necessarily a fast charger), the demand for fast chargers will be less.
Many EV owners now only charge at home (typically overnight) or only very rarely on a fast charger.
Also longer EV range and faster fast chargers (so you don't have to be on for so long) are coming.

Anything is a pollutant if there is too much of it.

No, no! Rights simply exist; they don't have to be asserted.