Blocked and Reported podcast just did a two-part series on the Kiwi Farms / Keffals incidents that were in the news lately. It's a complicated saga involving some weird characters. There's a lot more detail to it than what was reported in the major news media. Here's part 1:

https://www.blockedandreported.org/p/episode-131-who-is-stalking-the-twitch#details

Wouldn't it be possible to cache the distance/time for combinations of route segments, speeding future calculations that use that same combination of segments?

Yeah, that's a big problem. One story that I read said they would be fined 1 EUR ($1.1 million) for *each sale* of a non-essential product. There are enough products misclassified on Amazon that some could slip through the filters and end up costing them billions per day. So, I can see why they'd choose to close rather than take the risk.

I'm guessing the need for COBOL developers is mostly related to changes in business logic. Lots of states have changed eligibility rules, deadlines, disbursement schedules, etc. and that logic now needs to be implemented in software.

I'm way more afraid of the idea of the government being able to control social media platforms, than I am of whatever boogeyman-du-jour is being used to justify that control.

That sort of thing happens when the people using and driving for the taxi fleet are not the ones who incur the costs. In other words, the environmental costs are externalized. The solution is to build the cost of the environmental impact into the price of the service - i.e. internalize it - so that people will take that impact into account when making a purchase decision or comparing the prices of two options.

Which is why it can take 45 to 90 minutes for a taxi to show up - if they even show up at all.