The technology that was highlighted in that movie originated around that time or a bit before. It goes by several names, but WAMI (wide area motion imagery) is kind of the generic term; it allows a forensic tech to rewind and track objects (people, vehicles) after an event. With AI and persistent vision, bottomless data center storage, it will allow everything / everyone to be tracked at all times. People don't know that this is already deployed over many large cities; essentially global hawk drones with high resolution hemispherical cameras constantly flying patterns, watching everything.

Nothing says low pressure social interaction like having a camera all up in your face while you try to eat drink and be merry, amirite?

Let's be real. They blew the school up because it was a school, and most likely a lot of the leadership / military families sent their girls there. And our leaders are evil bastards, working for evil bastards on behalf of other evil bastards. It's an exercise for the reader to determine the nature of those evil bastards.

Maybe this info needs to be stored in some kind of encrypted escrow format. The database, instead of having an address, would have a blob that decrypts to the address in the shipper's system. And maybe not the full address, but only just enough information for routing - when the shipper picks it up, if its local they get the full address, if its across the country they just get enough to get the nearest distribution center, which has a key to decrypt the recipient's distribution center, and so on. at each stage only enough information so that it doesn't prevent routing optimization.

Over 60=net tax consumers who on average radically over-consume health benefits and entitlements relative to their lifetime tax contributions. The 20,30,40,50 year old workers may be getting 'paid' by because they're servicing those patients, but those patient's checks are written by and at the expense of their children, their grand children, great grandchildren, maybe even further removed than that. In other words, those checks are both written and cashed by the very same people working that hospital, which is a peculiar sort of arrangement.

That's not to say we shouldn't take care of older folks; we should. Nor am I laying blame on those people, but that voting block is quite powerful, and continuing to live is a powerful instinct. However, it is a fact. When just one emergency can outstrip anything most people have ever scrimped and saved, it's kind of inevitable. Our entire system is just broken, and something has got to give, sooner or later.

It's dreadfully simple: if you want to keep kids off the interwebs, you have to prove you're not a kid, do you not? So you pass a law which says that as a company providing social media must effectively positively identify the entire user base in that locality. Are they going to erase that proof once a positive identification is made? Of course not! It's a value added proposition to these companies, which in addition to pitching advertisements, operate as data brokers. Positively identifying your users only means more money.
Your identity is now forever tied to your profile and posts, unless you chose to post only to obscure non-mainstream sites which have no reach.
Presto voila, anonymity is forever gone, and so is the meaningful ability to communicate perspectives which are contrary to the mainstream narrative, which is almost always completely manufactured and curated. If you dare post something that someone in a position of power dislikes for whatever reason, the police know just who hunt down, and thanks to the omnipresent surveillance networks they probably know to a very precise degree where you're at, at all times.

The stasi wished they possessed an iota of the ruthless efficiency.

You mentioned whatever a human policeman can see and memorize. That's the difference.
If all policemen had a photographic autobiographical memory, eyelids which never closed, required no sleep, were connected to a distributed consciousness which never forgot anything they ever saw and allowed them to collaborate across vast distances, and furthermore could be inexpensively placed at every intersection... I'm confident the founders would have outlawed them.

Lead, arsenic, hexavalent chromium, mercury all sorts of nasty stuff. A lot of Chinese stainless steel is just a bunch of scrap metal alloyed into something that looks right. You never know if you get 201 stainless or some amalgamation of debased material.

For generations the women in the family took care of the financials of the family. They kept budgets, wrote checks and balanced the books. Females are quite capable of doing math.

I think the problem is 1) families are going the way of the dodo. 2) virtue signaling is now included as a category to be balanced on the books for egurls, and that virtue signaling is disproportionally weighted against everything else. Gotta spend a lot on clothes and travel for your instas so you can pull a whale that doesn't exist and wouldn't want you even if he did.

Early access games getting faster after release is probably more a result of removing debugging from the build more than outright optimization.

So the cooling loop is a hermetically sealed ethylene glycol filled system. NOBODY but nobody cares about that; that is what people call a red herring at best and a diversion at worst. Every large building uses this type of system in some capacity.
What provides the cooling to the main loop? Is it provided by refrigeration, via water chillers? Then it uses gobs of power, which is a concern to other customers of the power supply. Is it provided by evaporative cooling towers? Then it uses gobs of water and a somewhat less power--which is a major concern in many of the areas they plan on installing these data centers. Is it a dry cooler--just a heat exchanger? The process temperature will be too high and it probably cannot operate in the desert where they plan on installing many of these colossal data centers.

So what is it? Or are they cooled by unicorn flatulence and billionaire's hearts?

V2G is user configurable until they push an OTA update and then it isn't. Maybe I'm just a pessimist, but I could see a scenario where GM, Tesla or whoever just up and decides to sell your battery capacity, or maybe they're forced by the government to do it.

In any event, I'd welcome being able to use my car as a giant battery bank to power *my* house / refrigerator / heater in the event of a prolonged power outage. Everyone else can suck it.

Depends on what you classify as traditional plants. Solar and wind, you'd have a point. However, coal and natural gas plants emit orders of magnitude more radioactivity directly into the environment in the form of naturally occurring radioactive materials (uranium, thorium, radon, traces of other elements) as a consequence of their normal operations. Fission plants basically only do that during catastrophic failure modes.

500 panels per 1000 m^2 is pretty achievable, accounting for whatever roof penetrations and facilities that need to be there. Some of those buildings are outright colossal. Plus, nobody is saying the data centers needs to be completely powered by solar.
Here's the thing: the lions share of power consumption on the grid traditionally comes from cooling. Most cooling needs, outside of the context of data centers, coincides with the sunniest, highest production times for solar panels. There is a great synergy to take advantage of here. It might be that a such a data center / solar farm farm actually produces net power for a portion of the day, covering for residential use or car charging etc. but is a net consumer off peak hours, when it's more efficient to use other means to supply power when most other consumers aren't using as much. Net effect is better grid utilization and reduced costs all around.

The yields are much higher, and the number of warheads is insane, but there are only so many targets. Should the worst come to pass, there will be a lot of overlap, devastated areas hit multiple times. Also, a lot of these will be aimed at mostly empty space where the silos live, in order to stop the enemy from second / third strikes. I think the idea that everyone will launch everything all at once is just not likely.