This aspect is too often glossed over. Here in France roughly a third of the population lives in flats, and it's usually the "less-fortunate". In particular social housing (housing provided by the state) is almost entirely flats. Recharging the EV of the people who live in flats is going to require a lot of infrastructure changes, and so far I have seen absolutely no action in that direction. This 2035 deadline has some pretty unpleasant "let them eat cake" implications, and could spill into some horrible class warfare when the well-off are driving around in their electric SUVs while the rest are told to give up their car and ride an electric scooter.

Well, the internet has improved the quality of information. Wikipedia - for all its faults - is a million times bigger and better than the Encyclopedia Britanicas of old. When I want to carry out minor repairs on my car or my bike or my washing machine, in a few seconds I can bring up a Youtube video. Remember having to keep several maps in your car, most of which would be out of date and leave you unaware of a bypass built 5 years ago? And so on...
I will concede that the internet has not improved the quality of information in every domain.

In much of Western Europe Dacia is a runaway success. Dacia is basically the Renault/Nissan "cheap and cheerful" brand, the most basic models even have - shock, horror - wind-up windows.
Plenty of people buy them by choice - they choose to spend their money on something other than a glorified shopping trolley.

SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule swaps docking ports on space station. Crew Dragon can autonomously dock with the space station - no robotic arms involved.

Maybe you're thinking of Dragon 1, which was pulled into the station by Canadarm2? However - as implied by the name - it's made by Canada, nothing to do with Russia.

And I'm very surprised that neither the ArsTechnica article nor any of the comments either here on on ArsTechnica mentioned it. For me it's literally the first hit when I google "battery locomotive".

No one is going to mention that one of the most cost-effective means of combating all forms of pollution is freely-available contraceptive pills?

If I follow your line of reasoning - any company that sucks at the public teat should be nationalised - would that include the entire US military-industrial complex?

Top tip for any heavily polluting industry: just dilute your lethal emissions, then dilute a bit more... there you have it! You are now within the rules and are no longer a nasty polluter!

There's statistics, and there's anecdotes. Here are a few anecdotes - for info, I live in France:

• Price of natural gas (for home heating) has just gone up 5%
• I bought a second-hand car in 2015, and sold it last year for a profit - note that this was not a collector's item, it was a bland runabout. Second-hand car prices are crazy.
• House prices are up roughly 15% since 2015
• And so on...

At what point do I decide that the official inflation figures are as trustworthy as tractor production figures in the old Soviet Union?

And S.Korea's place at the top of the list is thanks to its famously open-armed attitude towards immigrants in general, and foreign students in particular.

30k satellites will only happen if Starship achieves its goal of being really cheap to launch - and if they achieve that, then astronomers will be really keen to build telescopes in space anyway, so maybe the problem will just go away? SpaceX could even offer to launch 10 Hubble-sized telescopes for free in order to "buy off" the astronomer community. They could probably do it with a single launch.

Many years ago I read the following, right here on Slashdot:

Rising house prices are a tax on youth

It was the first time that I was exposed to this idea, and iIt basically sums up this thread. Boomers (mostly - but also some Xers) have enjoyed the prosperity created by rising house prices - e.g. banks made record profits, which were taxed, which in turn helped keep other taxes down.

Unfortunately... it was just a Ponzi scheme. It started to collapse in 2008, but was staved off with unprecedented measures - ultra-low interest rates, quantitative easing. But it cannot be staved off for ever. The piper is calling.

This, this, a thousand times this.
The falling birthrate is a real problem; the current solution is to import large numbers of people from the third world, which is bone-headed:
1) Either you import illiterate goat-herders from Civilwaristan, and hope that with a few months of training you can turn them into payroll clerks, dental hygienists, or IT support staff.
2) Or you import the best doctors & engineers from Africa and Asia. Which is basically colonialism - but instead of taking mere diamonds and metals, you're taking their rarest, most precious resource: smart, highly-trained brains.

Interesting. I have a very similar story: I was doing database work, feeling bored and wanted to do GUI stuff. Went to an interview and told them clearly that I felt stuck in my current job: I was pretty good at database stuff, and my current employer wanted me to stay there. But I wanted to expand my skill set.
So at the interview, it was clear to all parties that I would start the new job writing SQL and stored procedures, then, after proving myself, I would move into GUI work. They assured me that they needed people with both skillsets, so it all sounded good.
I started a project. Some time after, I learnt that the entire DB system would be outsourced to an Indian firm in about 2 years time, more likely 3-4 years. And I would be doing 100% DB work in the meantime - my employer had no intention of training me up to use this system, then replacing me with another person in 6 months time.
So I left.

I'm unclear as to why anyone in the Russian admiralty would have loaded tons of gold onto a second-rate warship sailing straight into a battle? And where was it supposed to be carrying the gold *to*?