objects that are 40 ly away are potentially easier to see with detail than if it's 40M ly away. Assuming there are no gas clouds in the way.

I mean if we don't see some kind of positive benefit to the return to work mandates, why should businesses bother with them?

The primary component of smog is nitrogen oxides. You can easily measure this yourself, or look up numerous studies.

The whole tire particles thing is serious, but not the most serious thing we face. And ultimately, even if you are using your own two feet for transportstion you're leaving behind a miniscule amount of microplastic from your shoes.

It's good to be the King.

A night out with a mistress is only slightly more expensive.

I find landmines more praftical. It's set it, then forget it.

Apparently we don't like immigrants or money.

The vast majority of accidents are caused by driver error. So I worry you're not seeing the forest for the trees.

I believe the observers did not identify the flying object.

At half the quality!

Churning out garbage to pad out the library is what Netflix has always done, and AI is going to really ramp up their ability to do this.

Long-term, we'll cancel our subscriptions when the service is no longer a good value.

Car inspections are a tax on the poor. Here in California we have Smog test every two years on cars older than 8 years.
Can't afford a new car? Then you gotta take time out of your day for a $50 test.
Almost every shop will just retest you until you pass, but will refuse to test you if you have any error lights on your dash or codes that come back after being cleared.
You are still responsible for paying your license fee, but they won't give you updated tags until you pass your smog. You'll get a ticket and a potentially complicated interaction with a police officer if you drive with expired tags. The ticket costs nothing to fix if you show your correction to a police officer before the deadline. Which means you have to flag one down and hope he's not too busy to help you. Or you can schedule an appointment at the DMV, wait time is around 45 to 90 minutes.

I went back home and drove through an area I haven't been through in 15 years. They added a roundabout outside my midwestern home town. But I discovered it in the middle of the night, way out on a country road (a county expressway really). There were no street lights, or even lights on the signage. I was going 55 mph then had to stomp on the brakes when I saw a yield sign that I did not expect. Squeaked my tires a bit and I almost slid into the roundabout lane. Not my idea of a great first experience with them.

It's something like 96% of large companies are private in the EU. It's about 87% in the US. A significant difference, but maybe not what most people imagine.

The main difference between EU and US is how capital is raised and somewhat a different cultural around capital between the two.
Publicly funded companies in the US are much easier to run than in the EU, as the regulations are and costs are significantly less for a US company. Access to public capital in the US means that multiple rounds of funding is possible, so that a successful company can continue to grow even while spending outpaces revenue. The flip side is that US companies are very prone to create market bubbles as investment overheats around new markets. Because you can only run a company in the red for so long, the day nobody wants to finance another round of funding is when you have to do lay offs and close branch offices.

Coming up with plausible lies is a creative process that can be difficult to produce on such a tight schedule. Perhaps AI will solve that problem, it is pretty good at lying right to your face.