Excellent points. When I first saw the cyber truck it was like "cool", then very soon after, "could it be any more lethal to cyclists and pedestrians?".
Should be renamed Tesla Killdozer. Probably sell even better to certain constituencies.

A "good" programmer will spend an age crafting a check digit validation for SSN, or a whizzy date picker.
Completely ignoring the inappropriateness of using the first for a validating a search of messy data, and the second for DOB entry.
But they will have a whale of a time browsing stackoverflow and regaling their colleagues in the process.

Non-biodegradable waste plastic is a carbon sink at the moment. If these are aerobic bacteria then pretty sure they will emit CO2 when digesting it. Which is arguably going to be bigger problem than the original plastic waste.

how much worse could a few prima ballerinas be?

Not plate tectonics, subsidence. Principally anthropogenic. Dude.

It's not that quite simple.
The reason drugs cost less outside of US is classic market segmentation.
Say you can sell Y of drug X at $1000 in the US. NB The price point at which a drug will be bought is determined either by government fiat (most of the world), or by *national* health insurers (US) - it either sells to the full cohort or none*
Then consider Unnamed-But-Poor country with a large population. No way they can afford $1000, so zero sales. Then they negotiate a price of $100. Now the manufacturer gets new sales of (other country cohort)*$100, plus a nice glow of being humanitarian.
If you abolish segmentation i.e. drugs freely traded internationally, and we assume the manufacturer needs to recoup the same amount, then the US price becomes (US cohorts*$1000- (Other country cohort)*$100)/US cohorts. Which will be less than the current US price, but a lot more than the current non-US price.
And the number of people availing of said drug world wide will fall dramatically.

The interesting thing is why market forces, if we include non-legal ones, aren't capitalising on this. For now I'm presuming it's conservatism on the part of the consumer i.e. most people who *may* need expensive drugs have a complex medical condition. They consider it a better option to candidly engage with doctors who will carefully monitor their symptoms along with provide a quality assured supply of drugs, and vary these drugs appropriately, It's not like the patient is going to think "well, the doc put me on drug X, I'll get that a lot cheaper from Sneaky Pete at the street corner but keep attending to the doc without telling him".

Just look up radiocarbon dating calibration, this has been known since the discovery of said process.

...bet there are some red faces back in the Oort cloud - especially among all the Shoemaker-Levy fanbois.

While I agree wholeheartedly that overpopulation is the elephant in the room, I believe it's political sensitivity is more to do with the nostrum of continual economic growth, and in particular the desire to featherbed ageing populations in the developed world with fresh young worker bees.

So basically, millions of tons of CO2 are acceptable to ensure the (affluent) population has instant access to a schedule of 100s of (crap) programs and doesn't have to get off their arses to press a switch 5 m away?
No wonder we're fscked.