There are several somewhat smaller pickups available for sale in the US (Ford Ranger, GM's Colorado/Canyon twins, Toyota Tacoma, Nissan Frontier, and the Honda Ridgeline) but one issue they run into is that they just aren't that much cheaper than an F-150 or Tundra. The issue is that making a big vehicle really isn't much more expensive than making a small one; the design cost is the same, setting up the tooling & assembly line costs the same, the raw materials to make it bigger are cheap; steel is less than $800 per ton, all the electronic bits and stuff will cost the same, and so on. The only real difference is the bigger engine & transmission costing a few grand more to make. So overall, when big pickups cost only a few thousand more to make than mid-sized ones, it should surprise no one when they sell for only a few grand more, and that many people will be willing to pay that extra bit for the larger size.

Exactly this. If a government is doing such a bad job at managing its currency & fiscal system that people turn privately run internet money, well that is the government's fault. One just needs to look at Venezuela for recent example of a country miss-managing things that badly.

To be fair, there have been plenty of times throughout history when governments have failed horribly at controlling their currency, and some sort of private alternative would be rather appealing. And that sort of shift can happen in relatively short periods of time. For example, in 1912, Germany had a very stable currency & fiscal system. Ten years later you could leave a wheelbarrow full of money on the side of the road, and people would steal the wheelbarrow & dump the cash. Or for a more recent example, take a look at Venezuela. They went from reasonably prosperous to full economic basket-case in about 5 years. (In 2014 their PPP GPD per capita was ~$17k; in 2018 it was ~$9k) These sorts of things are very hard to predict, so having backup means of transactions is not a bad thing; granted in this specific case I would be wary of how much control Facebook has over this, prefering more decentralized systems like Bitcoin. Bitcoin itself has been used by a lot Venezuelans to get around their failing currency. Citation for the Venezuela figures. https://www.worldeconomics.com...

Having both the audio and the text can help with certain learning disabilities, like dyslexia & related disorders.

One thing to remember is that refineries produce more than just gasoline out of the crude oil they take in - everything from lubricants, to jet fuel, to feedstock chemicals for plastics gets refined out of the crude. So as long as there is demand for these other petroleum products, there will be plenty of gasoline produced as a byproduct. So I expect stagnant to lowering gasoline prices, at least until people come up with alternatives to those other petroleum products.

The murder and sexual assault are alleged to have occurred after the escape; he was in prison for kidnapping someone.

He was in jail on a aggravated kidnapping conviction, and also has child abuse convictions on his record. As toonces33 mentioned, he allegedly murdered one of the prison works during/after the escape.

Well, for the first bit, he has been in prison since 2012 after being convicted of kidnapping someone; he is suspected of murdering a prison official after he made his escape.

Consider this - in the early 1800s, astronomers noticed that the orbit of Uranus wasn't matching their predictions. Some of them at the time proposed that we would need to modify the formulas used to describe orbital motion, that gravity behaved differently in the far reaches of the solar system. Others proposed that there was a yet unseen planet (or a "dark planet") whose gravity was disturbing the orbit of Uranus. Twenty some years later, and the second group turned out to be right. We now call that dark planet Neptune. Or for another example; in the late 1920s Pauli discovered that beta decay did not seem to obey the laws of energy conservation. So he proposed that there was an extremely hard to detect particle (not too different from most dark matter proposals today) that would make the math add up right. It was several decades before we directly detected that particle; we call it the neutrino.

Of course, on the flip side, there have been times when new theories have been needed, like how when people noticed Newtonian gravity didn't describe Mercury's orbit well, but Einstein's theories matched its path more accurately. Various modified gravity theories have been put forward as an alternative to the dark matter theory, to explain things like the rotation curves of galaxies acting strangely. Yet a variety of observations seem to to fall more on the dark matter side. For example, the bullet cluster (and some others) show gravitation lensing that is disconnected from the visible matter. Or there have been two galaxies discovered that DO have rotational curves matching what our regular gravity theories predict. That is really hard to make work with any modified gravity theory, but with the dark matter theory we can just say those galaxies happen to not have much dark matter. And on the flip side, there is a galaxy (Dragonfly 44) that from gravitation lensing seems to be as massive as the milky way, yet is only 1% as bright. Easy to explain with the dark matter theory, but difficult with the modified gravity.

Here is an article by an astronomer who proposed something like this - using a swarm of satellites using solar-sails to move the the L1 point and perform station keeping; he estimates it would need about 20 million tons worth of satellites. If Space X's Starship works as planned this ends up being within the realm of possibility. You would need 200,000 Starship launches, or 10k a year for 20 years. Huge by today's space flight standards, though trivial next to the number of commercial aircraft (there are roughly 100,000 commercial aircraft flights every single day). If each launch costs $10 million, and the satellites themselves, when produced en mass on an assembly line, cost another 10 million per launch, that works out to be $4 trillion, or $200 billion a year for 20 years That would probably be cheaper than trying to move everything to renewable energy; Germany by itself has spent hundreds of billions of dollars over the last 15 years on solar & wind, and has only managed to replace ~35% of its electrical production, not to mention all the extra power that will be needed to replace their existing gas/diesel cars with electric vehicles. https://www.eurekalert.org/pub...

$65 million USD won't get you very far, in regards to building a satellite network. That's one Falcon 9 launch & spare change. IMHO it would make more sense to wait for Starlink to get its service going, and use that $65 million to subsidize antennas/service for poor people. Its going to be difficult for any satellite internet company to compete with Starlink, since they are part of SpaceX and thus will have lower launch costs than everyone else.

This phone is not for you then; this phone is aimed at East Asian people who spend 2-4 hours a day on public transport going to and from work/school, and want to play games to kill time while doing do. Asus makes a number of different cellphones, perhaps one of those would fit your needs better. As a side note, this phone will have better battery life than most other Android flagships, due to the large battery, pretty much any Android phone these days can use its internal GPS & an offline map app, and this particular phone does support FM radio.

The Soviet Union would have lost against Germany without US lend-lease aid. Don't take my word for it, look at Khrushchev's memoirs. "I would like to express my candid opinion about Stalin's views on whether the Red Army and the Soviet Union could have coped with Nazi Germany and survived the war without aid from the United States and Britain. First, I would like to tell about some remarks Stalin made and repeated several times when we were "discussing freely" among ourselves. He stated bluntly that if the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war. If we had had to fight Nazi Germany one on one, we could not have stood up against Germany's pressure, and we would have lost the war. No one ever discussed this subject officially, and I don't think Stalin left any written evidence of his opinion, but I will state here that several times in conversations with me he noted that these were the actual circumstances. He never made a special point of holding a conversation on the subject, but when we were engaged in some kind of relaxed conversation, going over international questions of the past and present, and when we would return to the subject of the path we had traveled during the war, that is what he said. When I listened to his remarks, I was fully in agreement with him, and today I am even more so." From Page 638. https://books.google.com/books...

I disagree; both would be considered Personal Computers in my book. First of all, they are personal devices, intended to be used by one person at a time. Secondly, both are general purpose computing devices, capable of doing a wide variety of tasks, from office work like word processing & spreadsheets, to imagine & video editors, can be used to create new software as well, and of course can run various games & media consumption programs. So, yeah PC is an accurate description.

I would personally set copyright at 20 years, to have them be the same length as patents. After all, if 20 years is good enough for life-saving drugs that cost $$$ to develop, it should be good enough for the latest cape movie.