Apparently not. Otherwise, consumers would not buy all those additional features. Some people calling themselves car guys have claimed for a long time that too much technology in a car is a bad thing. But that's not what consumer demand tells the car companies. And if you look at statistics, car break downs per mile driven are in a constant decline. A 1970ies car at 100,000 miles was ridden down. A 2020ies car at 100,000 miles is just well driven in. Yes, people could fix the 1970ies car themselves. Just buy the manual and the spare part, and off you go. But that was a necessity, not a feature. Today, people want their Apple Carplay and their Android Auto. And that means you need a computer as your head unit. People want cruise control and good mileage, and that means electronic injection. Lambda catalysts have reduced car emissions, and unleaded fuel has severally brought down violent crime numbers 20 years later. This also required electronic injection. People don't want to crank down their windows, and that means electric window controls. People like their stability control, so the car does not go off the road uncontrolled if you make a steering mistake. People like anti lock brakes. Airbags and pretensioners have brought down road fatalities from their heights in the 1970ies.

Yes, you now need to be a learned car specialist to service a car. But you need service far less often, and your car is a better car in all other aspects.

Yes and now. It was also the Age of Discoveries. That means that basically each ship crossing the oceans at the time also had a part time or full time scientist on board, who was measuring everything he could put his instruments on. The Royal Navy and its requirements for logs also demanded a lot of data to be taken daily, including air and water temperature.

Depending on the region you live in, it goes back until 1736 (e.g. Schoenbrunn, Vienna and Mannheim, Germany). In this year, several observatories in Central Europe agreed to take regularly measurements of weather data and keep a log of them.

And yes, that's the time when Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit (1686 - 1736), Anders Celsius (1701 - 1744) and René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur (1686 - 1757) lived, each constructing his own type of thermometer, and defining his own temperature scale.

It was Attachmate, which swallowed Novell and spun of for instance SuSE Linux before being itself acquired by Micro Focus. SuSE S.A. is now a separate company in Luxembourg, and maybe, they are holding the original UNIX licenses, as it would fit into their portfolio.

I never sold any power to the grid. I just offset some grid usage with my own power.

As I have paid 300 Euros for a pair of solar panels and a rectifier back in March, and despite the panels not being optimally mounted (straight upright, facing Southwest, and partly in the shadow from nearby trees), I harvested already 200 kWh as of today, I am pretty sure, "green energy" is not about twice as expensive as it should be. Even a badly mounted setup will return the investment in less than five years.

This is plain bullshit. Itâs that until recently, air condition was not necessary at all. Europe is very far to the north. Great Britain for instance lies between the latitudes of Vancouver Island and Juneau, Alaska. On the other side, Montreal, Canada is on the same latitude than Milan, Italy, and Toronto is as far to the north as Florence. Most of the continuous U.S. is somewhere between the Mediterran and the Sahara Desert. No one in southern Italy doubted the necessity of air condition in the Summer. For Germans or Scandinavians on the other hand, air condition was just a waste of space and energy, because it never was hot enough for A/C to make a difference, except in large office complexes with their large windows and basically no shadow. And they all have air condition. This year, nearly all European places have posted new local temperature highs. Europe today is hotter than it ever was in recorded history.

Are Austrians famous for following the regulations?

That's why back in the late 1970ies already, Germany developed FE-Schrift especially for license plates. It gives each letter a shape so unique, it does not even match in part another letter, making automatic recognition easier, and forging a license plate by covering up parts or adding color a lot more complicated.

We should also note that humans don't only rely on vision to drive cars. They also rely on noise heard by the ear, and on vibration felt with their body.

No one is actually pulling out. The U.S. has made it harder for foreign companies to import them. But there are still domestic manufacturers of EVs, like Tesla, Ford and Stellantis. This is something very else: For the last decade, one big argument against EVs was "bad resale value", because EVs were seen as a novelty, and fear for dead batteries, fueled by the problems with first gen Nissan Leafs, made buyers wary of used EVs. Additionally, there were not many used EVs on the market to begin with, fleet operators did not have many young EVs to sell, and prices did not really average out yet.

Now, demand for EVs is rising due to high fuel prices, and a good public charging network making EVs a viable alternative for many people. And also people looking for bargains are hitting the market, and with used batteries not being the problem they were thought to be, used EVs have its own value proposition. We have here the normal effect of demand rising more than the available supply.

So can I. The next supermarket is right across the street. The next one right beside the first one, and a third across the next street. Still, I like the cargo trike, because I don't need to carry stuff.

Me.

I solved this problem by a) riding an incumbent cargo trike for grocery shopping and b) not liking ice cream.

Your math is wrong. Not the actual numbers, but the way you apply them. Your idea is to build big power plants rivaling what you know from steam turbine powered based power plants (how the steam is heated, coal or nuclear or fusion or whatever the heat source du jour might be, is completely irrelevant). But that's not how Wind and Solar work. If you just cover the public parking spaces of Houston, TX with solar panels, you would not take a single farmer's land, and still, you would be able to power the whole city of Houston. It begs the question though why Houston needs that much parking, and if that's not the real waste of space. By the way, that's what Portugal does with parking spaces in the country - cover them with solar panels. It cools the tarmac below, improves the ambient temperature in the towns, and generates energy. And you can build glass houses with solar panels instead of pure glass sheets. There are solar panels which have 50% transparency. They provide enough light for the plants in the glass house, and still generate surplus electric energy.

Denmark started with wind turbines 40 years ago, and now, Wind accounts for more than 50% of Denmark's electricity generation. In Germany, Wind accounts for 30% of Germany's electricity (the high prices for electricity in Germany have very bureaucratic, and quintessentially German reasons with braindead legislation, but that's another chapter). Ah yes, biogas currently generates the same amount of electricity in Germany as Nuclear did the last year before it was switched off. And then there is balcony power - a concept completely alien to the U.S., but widespread in Europe. For about 300 EUR, you can get a small do-it-yourself solar power plant, and legally assemble it yourself and plug it into your wall socket (any wall socket will do). No licensed electrician required. It's limited to 800 Wp - but hey, free energy for everyone. In a town with 10,000 apartments, this would be akin to a 8 MWp power plant for the price of 3 million bucks - without any tax payer money. If you want to pay an electrician, buy 10 of them. Or 30. And he will do the connection to the grid. For 10,000 EUR, you get 25 kWp solar power, which should cover most of your electric energy needs. If the 20,000 households in a medium sized town would do it, we are talking 500 MWp. That's the usual size of a nuclear reactor.