I've seen how this one ends.

All he does is say the parent has to open an UTMA account with X Financial to receive the share. It's not really a free share. It's a promo bonus for opening an account with him for your kid.

It's actually not that complicated. This is essentially a brokerage account-opening bonus- which the major banks have done in various capacities for over a decade. Anybody can sign their kids up for their "free" share, but in exchange for $150 worth of stock, he gets all of the kid's information and makes X financial the default brokerage platform for them once they become of age (after all, they already have an account).

This. Musk isn't doing anything out of the goodness of his heart. It's a way to try to get people into his financial ecosystem. I got a much bigger cash bonus for signing up for my [major bank] brokerage account.

People want children, but most don't want 3+ children. Most wealthy families don't have 3+, they have 1-2 like everyone else. If every couple only has 1-2, you are still looking at population decline.

I don't think international experience backs that up. The places where birthrates are highest are places where people can barely afford to eat. Scandinavia still has low birthrates despite a lot of family-friendly policies. The Central African Republic has high birthrates despite being one of the poorest countries on earth.

When given a choice, most people will choose either no kids or to only have 1-2. Kids are a lot of work no matter how much money you have.

I still use forums for special-interest sites. They are the best for curating a body of knowledge like fixing/maintaining a vintage car. Sites like reddit were never good for a how-to guide. Youtube can be helpful, but video can be a clunky medium for conveying basic information like a torque specification.

This sounds a lot like the coding boot camps that were all the rage ~10 years ago. The initial ones were rigorous and funded by outside money that made them cheap. Eventually, you got a bunch of dodgy copycats charging too much money to turn out people with very questionable abilities.

Given the high-profile names associated and zero costs, it's probably a good deal for the initial class. A few will probably get rich. The rest can just go to college later. But let's not pretend this sort of model will be a sustainable alternative to college for the masses.

The rule with Apple products is you always wait until the third iteration to buy if you are generally interested. That way you get through all the issues and kinks, and the tech advances to the point that it fully works as intended. Usually, the first gen is more of a "proof of concept" for bleeding edge early adopter types.

I can see some appeal, but there are two issues with a foldable phone: not as nice as a regular phone in folded mode when "on the go" and likely not as durable. I will drop my phone dozens of times over its life, but out of hundreds of phone drops I've only ever seriously damaged one (fortunately right before it was due for replacement anyways). I'm not so confident a folding phone will be so drop resistant. Plus, the consequences will be higher if it does break.

I don't think that's really accurate. We can't produce a Saturn V and Apollo Lander for the same reason Chevrolet can't produce a 1969 Camaro: it would require going back and reproducing entire supply chains that no longer exist and doing so based on obsolete standards. It's not that it can't be done with current tech, but that it makes absolutely zero sense to produce a car (or rocket) in 2026 the same way we did in 1969. Imagine how silly it would be to attempt to rebuild the Apollo guidance computer the same way it was first built in 1966 when your watch has many orders of magnitude more computing power.

The delays in going back to the moon have largely been political rather than anything to do with engineering. Congress mandated a wildly inefficient process for a heavy launch vehicle (SLS) by mandating that many firms/components be recycled from the Space Shuttle. Then, because a simple replication of Apollo isn't that exciting, they chose a far more technically ambitious solution that a tiny lander that they could barely cram 2 people in. The Apollo Lander had a dry mass of about 5 tons (similar to a small commercial truck). The Starship HLS is expected to have a dry mass of around 100 tons. We are trying to get 20x the mass to the moon that we did in 1969, and we are doing it with a tiny fraction of the budget (in terms of percentage of GDP devoted to the project).

The Chinese manned landing program includes a lander with just a bit more mass than Apollo. The U.S. plan includes a 100+ft tall Starship-based lander. It's a huge amount of mass to get to the moon and far beyond what any earth-launched rocket could get to trans-lunar orbit without refueling. Hence, the U.S. program being dependent on multiple in-orbit refuelings. They'll need to launch at least half a dozen rockets from earth to get anything to the moon, while the Chinese only need one.

Given that the Starship is still nowhere close to its planned 200T to low-earth orbit (v3 is supposedly capable of 100T, but V2 was only 30T), the U.S. concept is still a long way from being ready. Meanwhile, the fairly conventional Chinese launch vehicle (Long March 10) has already launched and is gearing up for its first orbital test next month. To be fair, Starship has flown too and is also gearing up for an orbital launch, but they still don't have the payload, refuel, and heat shields fully figured out. Unlike the Starship, they aren't trying to make the Long March 10 reuseable.

I'm 20 years out of undergrad with two graduate degrees, and when I switched jobs late last year the company wanted my undergrad GPA. I doubt the actual decisionmakers looked at it or cared though.

The problem is that the vast majority of legitimate businesses stopped using unsolicited calls a long time ago. The callers that are left are mostly scam centers in places like SE Asia that use spoofed numbers and some combination, robodialers, AI, and slave labor. Since the calls are typically already scams of various nature, the callers already face criminal penalties. A theoretical fine they will never pay isn't going to change behavior at all.

The thing that can help is better call filtering at the OS level. iOS already has AP-enabled call answering, but there's still no way to do a rules-based filtering criteria besides a whitelist only method. An AI agent that could be set up to answer and automatically classify the message as spam and delete before the user is notified could go a long way. Also, carriers need to get better about security. It's still way too easy to spoof phone numbers.

I don't think you can just blame this on being 17. I did a hike of slightly longer distance/elevation in late fall/early winter at 18. This was pre smartphone, but post internet. Knowing I'd be going 26 miles and 8,000 vert, I brought 3 liters of water and roughly 5,000 calories of food (with a known resupply point at the 1/4 point and halfway). I started at 5am knowing I'd be in for a VERY long day (ended up finishing at 8pm by headlamp). At no point did I ever think I could do an 18 mile hike in 5 hours on 1/2 liter of water.

It's hit or miss. It can be helpful in finding bike paths or official bike routes and ways to connect them in some locations. But it will also occasionally route through roads that would be quite dangerous to ride on due to heavy traffic. Additionally, it will sometimes route on gravel roads/paths without asking whether unpaved is ok. Gravel roads may be fine on some bikes and some roads, but deep gravel may be unrideable on road bikes. If you aren't careful and didn't check the route, you could end up walking your bike for miles (particularly bad in hard-sole road bike shoes) or do a lot of extra miles to route around you weren't expecting.

If I'm planning a ride, I will use the google maps bike directions as a starting point but use satellite/street view to review/revise the route.