I think a big part of the problem is how people and companies define "earn". Microsoft for instance produces most of its products out of offices in Redmond. Those products are then licensed to customers through a relatively tiny office in Nevada or somewhere that has a much lower tax rate. By doing this Microsoft can claim all of their profit in a State that minimizes their tax rates, and they get to claim the Redmond offices as a loss because they don't bring in any profits, even though it is the Redmond office actually building the product. Most reasonable people would look at this and say that the profits are earned where the product is produced, not simply where it is sold.
Information exists even if everybody is ignorant of its existence. People were dying from viruses and bacteria for millions of years before anyone even guessed at their existence. Just because we lack a perfect knowledge and so can't make perfect predictions, doesn't invalidate determinism.
Functionally speaking, there is no difference between snap decisions and ones that you make over the course of a decade. The only difference is complexity or number of interactions that lead up to the output. As humans it is easier for us to work with problems that are smaller in scale and so we can more easily account for a larger percentage of the inputs and predict the outcome more reliably. Which is why we can sometimes predict snap decisions reliably, but long term decisions elude us. In the end you and I can think about a problem all we want but the decision we each reach, the amount of time we spend thinking about it, and everything and anything else touching on it were determined to happen from the instant of the big bang and beyond.
There is really no such thing as random events. There is only interactions with outcomes that we aren't able to comprehend and predict yet. Just because we likely can't ever reach a point that we can know every single bit of information in a system and so predict the output doesn't mean it isn't strictly deterministic. It is simply more comfortable for us to believe we are special and have free will than to accept the alternative.
Where is it that you only salt meat after cooking? I ask because practically every meat recipe I've ever read included seasoning meats before cooking. The reason for doing so is you want the flavors to permeate the meat instead of just being on the exterior. In some processes it also helps tenderize the meat by breaking down long protein chains.
Burgers and their condiments are always a matter of personal taste. A burger in my opinion is never just about the meat, it's a sandwich that should include a ground beef patty, a leafy green, tomato slices, pickle slices, onion slices, some kind of cheese, a little mayo, ketchup, and mustard. Good alternatives are BBQ sauce for the condiment with caramelized sweet onions. And you can always add some strips of bacon to just about any burger to make it a little better. One thing that burgers have never been about is great meat, the whole point of ground beef is to find a use for tough cuts of meat. Making ground beef out of better cuts of meat is like putting flakes of gold leaf in your liquor.
All that said, tastes and expectations vary incredibly by region. I've had Swedish candy that was more salt than anything, where I would define a sweet taste as being requisite for anything to be a candy. A common theme of candy in Mexico and parts south is ground pepper so that it's a little spicy. I've drank a carbonated beverage that Coca Cola sells in South America that was bitter as hell, but apparently someone's buying and drinking it. Americans use Ketchup on all kinds of things, while Brits use brown sauce and vinegar. So called American cheese isn't actually even a cheese, it's a product made from by-products of making real cheese, some people love it while I'll take just about anything else.
I wouldn't recommend Olive Oil for cooking meats unless you're doing a low temperature cooking process. Olive oil has a relatively low smoke point. Safflower is my favorite as it won't start smoking till 510F or 265C.
The fat that melted away is still largely there, it's why those cuts taste so amazing. All that fat breaks down and basically bastes the meat from the inside out. If you cook your steak to the consistency of shoe leather then you've probably gotten rid of most of the fat but also ruined a perfectly delicious steak. It's the marbling in a cut of meat that is important and desirable, the big lumps are just waste and you lose little to nothing by trimming them off.
You could actually get a huge amount of fish from inland waterways here in the USA. A number of river systems are in danger of, or have been overrun by an invasive species of carp from Asia. Catching them isn't a challenge, finding a use for them has been the hangup.
While large, they aren't particularly fatty. Beyond that obesity is a relative measure, so even though a whale might have an 18 inch thick layer of blubber it isn't obese.
The gentrification debate is interesting. I have little to no sympathy for renters because it's a known danger of renting and should always be a part of your decision making. When it comes to property owners I'm a little more sympathetic, but a property owner can simply sell and move on so it should be less of an issue. I can see how that might be a little traumatic for a property owner that is responsible for a property that has been in the family for generations or something, but if you're that established keeping up with the property taxes as they climb shouldn't be that huge.
I can drive five minutes and be in a neighborhood where the houses go for up to half a million. Or I can drive in a different direction and be in an area where homes sell for $15k to $40k.
Disability might be the one welfare system I'd argue for keeping in some form or another. I'd like to see it limited to cases of actual complete or severely crippling disability. I currently know a guy who busted his knee on the job and now can't comprehend the idea of finding some other kind of work. He wants to sit around watching deluxe cable TV all day instead of finding a way to work that doesn't require walking or standing all day, and frankly that's BS. If I developed carpal tunnel I wouldn't expect everyone to give me a free pass and support my current standard of living. I'd adjust my standard of living, possibly moving, and or find some other line of work.
So far as the importance of living where you've always lived, that's some kind of imaginary right that people delude themselves into thinking exists. Maybe in the case of someone who relies on family or friends for daily care it's significant enough to worry about as a society, but otherwise screw them. The number of locations in the country where you can't find a very cheap place to live within a 2 hour drive of a very affluent location is vanishingly small. When I moved out of my parents place I moved less than 20 minutes away and had a housing bill that was probably less than 20% of what my parents were paying. If we quit disproportionately subsidizing peoples outlandish dreams of living in expensive cesspools like NYC the property markets will start to correct themselves.
It all depends on just how basic the basic income is. I would go with something less than $10k per adult per year, regardless of local. So if you want to live in an expensive part of the country without working any extra you're simply not going to make it. At that rate in Average Hometown America, you'd need to have roommates, prepare your own food, and probably ride a bike for transportation. Depending on how the economy turns out to be going we could gradually increase the UBI and maybe if the robot utopia ever comes about we can all live at a luxury level on UBI.
Odds are most people wouldn't be too excited to live in BFE and subsist on the bare minimum, I know I wouldn't. I mean that BFE is fine with me so long as I've got access to the internet with reasonable speeds, and can enjoy my hobbies. It would definitely mean I'd have to keep a job to pay for everything above the basic necessities. But it would mean I would have a lot more freedom in selecting the job I want to do, as going without a job wouldn't be as catastrophic as it is today.
"So you did manage to "remember ever needing to use one.""
Nope, I could have used one, if it weren't broken, but I didn't need it as evidenced by using the the service stations phone. You might as well claim that every time I had to wait for a ride I needed a pay or cell phone to arrange something faster, I didn't need it because I'm patient.
One of my favorite Dr. Seuss lines is "I meant what I said, and I said what I meant." If I make plans with someone and pass the point where I can easily communicate a change in plans, I stick with the last known good plan. I've already admitted the convenience of having a cell phone as it allows for more immediate changes in plans. But not having that crutch is hardly the travesty you seem to believe it is.
Hitch Hiking is and always has been relatively safe. The over hyped fears surrounding it are right up there with the stranger danger myths we perpetuate among children. Not that I'm advocating it as a primary mode of transportation, but the one time I was in a situation to need a ride without a plan a stranger helped me out.
1. A week sounds like a crazy long time to try and store energy reserves for. The only situation I can think of where that would be a likely occurrence with solar would be the far north where you might get snow coverage and for whatever reason don't clear off the panels/mirrors. That said though you'd just need to plan for a larger insulated storage container for the molten salt. The larger the storage container the more economical because the ratio of volume to surface area where you can lose heat favors you.
2. No clue, I'm no expert in this field and just have a passing knowledge of it from having perused Wikipedia some time ago. I can guess though that it'd be a less than ideal solution for solar PV and wind, because you'd be using produced electricity to heat the molten salt, storing the molten salt, and then using the heat from the molten salt to produce electricity again. The type of solar plant that this makes the most sense for is one that focuses the heat of the sun into the molten salt using mirrors as its primary operating mechanic and then you just add enough extra storage capacity to power through periods of darkness or shade. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... If you search for Heat Storage on that page you can find some details.
3. The wiki page above mentions tanks 30 feet tall and 80 feet in diameter being able to provide 100megawatts for 4 hours. If you use the average electricity consumption of the US as a baseline your city of 7m people would need 11.8 gigawatts of continuous power. So you'd need 118 of those tanks, or fewer tanks with a combined volume in the same ballpark, for every 4 hours of total darkness. My rough as hell calculations say something like 17.5 acres of storage tanks for every 4 hour block, if you go with 24 hours of storage it'll take up 420 acres, or about 2/3 of a square mile. All of that is presuming 30x80 foot tanks, you could save a lot of space by going with larger tanks and at least partially burying them. If you scaled these numbers up you could store 24 hours worth of electricity in molten salt tanks occupying just 30 square miles, for the entire USA.
If I needed a ride I arranged it before hand. Sometimes that meant having to wait around for my ride, because I wasn't going to have them show early and wait for me. Sometimes it meant taking public transport instead, riding a bike, or hoofing it on foot. The time I blew up the motor in my car I hitched a ride to the nearest gas station and used the landline there to call a local friend of the family, there was a payphone I would have been told to use if it hadn't been broken.
The home phone is basically a requirement of my employer, which is already annoyed enough that I don't have a cell phone. That despite the fact that I am not an on-call employee.
There are definite advantages to having a cell phone, but it brings a cash cost as well as the electronic leash. For some people they might even be a real necessity, but I think most people could get by without them with little real danger. It's kind of like microwave ovens, you don't really need them, practically everything they do can be done just as well if not better using an oven and stove top, but they are just to convenient for most people to go without.
I think molten salt thermal storage is the other option I remember hearing talked about. Though that would of course work a lot better with a solar plant that does molten salt to begin with instead of PV cells.
Payphones? Even when they were very prevalent I can't remember ever needing to use one. Over the last 20 years I've had cell phones at times and they were convenient. I haven't had one for the last 7+ years and can think of very few instances when I could have really used one. Periodically I think about getting a pay as you go phone to stash in my glove box just in case, but even that expense just doesn't seem worth it. If I could get my relatives and work to learn how to use email and such properly I'd be tempted to kill the landline phone.
The selection is almost unbelievably bad, especially considering they're selling it separately now. We got Prime for the shipping perks because it's an actual savings given how much we order stuff online. I definitely could not recommend prime video at this time.
There were some Navy and Marine troops at the tech school I attended during my stint. I will never forget seeing a formation of mixed sex marines stomping past a formation I was in. The WM's had arms bigger than my legs and honestly the only way they stood out from the males was that they were shorter on average.
I won't argue that salaries don't have an impact, but I think there are bigger money problems. Namely that security is literally always the last consideration before a system is brought online. As a result security ends up becoming more about justifying leaving vulnerabilities open than fixing them. Fixing known security holes often involves changing the way a system actually functions and plenty of risk for lengthy down times and outages when things don't go smoothly. Better funding can mitigate a lot of this but it only goes so far because if you get funded well then congress is likely to want a face to face whenever something goes wrong. Everyone is risk averse, and sadly their biggest perceived risk is getting called in to explain to congress why their application broke. In theory security has the teeth to pull an application from the network if it fails to meet specific standards, in practice I've never even heard of it happening.
My Father served in Vietnam as a medic. He said the only person he saw die that he felt no sympathy for was another medic who was known to inject ditch water into the brains of VC prisoners they were obliged to treat.
They were flying low with the doors open for whatever reason when their helicopter took some small arms fire. The guy was struck in the leg and fell out the door because he was too cocky to wear a safety harness.
While countries can be largely knocked off the internet by severing their physical connections, that isn't really the question at issue. The panel was asking about eliminating the ability for terrorists to organize and recruit over the internet, especially through the dark web. The reason this goal isn't the same as cutting off a country's access is that extremists aren't neatly limited to national boundaries and they certainly don't mind those borders when establishing websites for recruitment. It's the same basic problem that terrorists always pose, they are generally indistinguishable from the general public until such time as is too late.
The thing is I've found DIY instructions going back at least as far as the first announcement of the RIFT KS campaign. Those plans called for readily available and relatively cheap parts, that were basically plug and play. The two sticky points of the builds were the fragility of the LCD screen panel, and tweaking the software to give you side by side images. It might not work with games that weren't or haven't been designed with 3D in mind but from what I've read will readily work with anything done in Unity. For everything else it should be a matter of working with the mainstream graphics drivers 3D support.
What magic is their API supposed to be doing that is worth a $300+ markup? For a commercial finished product I would expect these things to cost around $300 to $400 with maybe a cheap out version at $250. The price is especially galling in view of the fact they are using AMOLED screens which are likely to have burnin within a couple years, and you can bet on them not making it easy to swap out the screen panels. I'm willing to spend a couple hundred bucks once or twice a decade for a monitor upgrade, but spending triple that for a viewing device that'll last a small fraction of that time is crazy.
Second hand is pretty much a loss with Kindles. It is easy enough to get digital copies for anything but I don't think anyone sells 2nd hand digital copies. You could in theory buy 2nd hand and then digitize your copy but that's a good bit of work and equipment you'll need. I keep thinking about it and the wife keeps telling me there's no space for it.
Bookselves, I got married and now instead of an entire wall of shelves, I'm allotted one and a half shelves. While my kindle does have limited storage space it can hold far more than my shelves reasonably could. And my kindle keeps it all neatly organized and searchable.
The kindle definitely represents a minor investment in hardware which can then be at risk. That said in the 20+ years that I've been reading a lot I've only ever lost one book and water damaged another. In my entire life I've only lost one pair of eyeglasses, I've had a prescription since I was 4. Maybe some people are more prone to losing or breaking things, but it hasn't been an issue for me.
Trading ebooks can be done readily enough I suppose. All of the titles I own are available and stored on my devices as DRM free files that can be shuffled around however you like. I suppose there are DRM'd titles out there, and probably simple methods of striping that DRM. So far as legal ways of trading ebook licenses, I have no clue, though if I bothered to read the legal wording of amazons terms of use there is probably something about being prohibited from reselling or trading ebooks.
A kindle isn't an ebook, it is a reader device for ebooks. The kindle I own today is unlikely to be functional in 70 years. However there is no reason to suppose that I won't have ready access to all of my ebooks that I've purchased or procured in 70 years. They are largely just text files with some formatting. At the most I would expect that at some point they might have to be run through a bit of software to be converted to a more modern format. In the meantime though I can have and store as many copies of those files as I like, in whatever fashion I like.
Kindles are cheap enough and killer features rare enough that I don't know that there would be much point in a trade in/up program. Swapping a battery would undoubtedly be more complicated than the same procedure for a smoke detector, but I don't see why you couldn't do it though you'd probably need some special plastic pry tools and a youtube tutorial.
If you sell your kindle the new owner would have a couple options. When you setup a kindle you register it to an Amazon account. The new owner could register it to themselves, at which point the device may wipe whatever content it held and sync with the new owners account. I'm not really sure about it wiping, but the new owner could just hook it up with a usb cable and download everything they wanted to keep, that you left on there. Alternatively the new owner could leave it registered to you, and just manually load whatever ebooks they want via usb cable and sync with your Amazon content. Again, so far as I know there isn't any officially authorized way to transfer legal ownership of ebook files.
I keep my Kindle in the car I drive to work everyday. When I take my sanity/lunch break I read while I eat. When the weather is nice, it's great to sit outside and enjoy reading a book. The crazy battery life is very handy as I can leave it in the car for a month at least between charges, it's one less thing to remember everyday. I can definitely see the draw of a tablet, but I also consider the Kindle to be cheap enough for a single use device.
"Will women be relieved that all the jerks have gone off with their sexbots and aren't bothering them anymore?"
This brings to mind the saying "Everything is about sex, except sex, that's about power." I've probably got that wrong but it's how I remember it going.
I think in many cases men who are jerks to women, seemingly only in it to get laid, are behaving that way to feel power over someone else. If it were only about getting their rocks off they'd utilize other more expedient methods to save money, time, and drama. So while anatomically functional robots might reduce this problem I don't think it'd be a large change.
My experience here is pretty limited by my one anecdote is from a friend who worked as a park ranger. He wanted to transition to being a regular Sheriff's deputy. On one of his ride alongs the deputy he was with made a stop to collect some free service from a prostitute. When he tried to bring it up with the sergeant he was shutdown and was soon removed from the program.
My guess would be that local LEO's are frequently entangled on some level with illegal prostitution in their areas. Any serious scrutiny from uninvolved LEO's is likely to stir up that history. Consequentially it is easier to ignore it and maintain the status quo. Maybe they make a show of busting some johns and prostitutes on an occasional basis, but otherwise if it's out of sight it's out of mind.
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I think a big part of the problem is how people and companies define "earn". Microsoft for instance produces most of its products out of offices in Redmond. Those products are then licensed to customers through a relatively tiny office in Nevada or somewhere that has a much lower tax rate. By doing this Microsoft can claim all of their profit in a State that minimizes their tax rates, and they get to claim the Redmond offices as a loss because they don't bring in any profits, even though it is the Redmond office actually building the product. Most reasonable people would look at this and say that the profits are earned where the product is produced, not simply where it is sold.
Information exists even if everybody is ignorant of its existence. People were dying from viruses and bacteria for millions of years before anyone even guessed at their existence. Just because we lack a perfect knowledge and so can't make perfect predictions, doesn't invalidate determinism.
Functionally speaking, there is no difference between snap decisions and ones that you make over the course of a decade. The only difference is complexity or number of interactions that lead up to the output. As humans it is easier for us to work with problems that are smaller in scale and so we can more easily account for a larger percentage of the inputs and predict the outcome more reliably. Which is why we can sometimes predict snap decisions reliably, but long term decisions elude us. In the end you and I can think about a problem all we want but the decision we each reach, the amount of time we spend thinking about it, and everything and anything else touching on it were determined to happen from the instant of the big bang and beyond.
There is really no such thing as random events. There is only interactions with outcomes that we aren't able to comprehend and predict yet. Just because we likely can't ever reach a point that we can know every single bit of information in a system and so predict the output doesn't mean it isn't strictly deterministic. It is simply more comfortable for us to believe we are special and have free will than to accept the alternative.
Where is it that you only salt meat after cooking? I ask because practically every meat recipe I've ever read included seasoning meats before cooking. The reason for doing so is you want the flavors to permeate the meat instead of just being on the exterior. In some processes it also helps tenderize the meat by breaking down long protein chains.
Burgers and their condiments are always a matter of personal taste. A burger in my opinion is never just about the meat, it's a sandwich that should include a ground beef patty, a leafy green, tomato slices, pickle slices, onion slices, some kind of cheese, a little mayo, ketchup, and mustard. Good alternatives are BBQ sauce for the condiment with caramelized sweet onions. And you can always add some strips of bacon to just about any burger to make it a little better. One thing that burgers have never been about is great meat, the whole point of ground beef is to find a use for tough cuts of meat. Making ground beef out of better cuts of meat is like putting flakes of gold leaf in your liquor.
All that said, tastes and expectations vary incredibly by region. I've had Swedish candy that was more salt than anything, where I would define a sweet taste as being requisite for anything to be a candy. A common theme of candy in Mexico and parts south is ground pepper so that it's a little spicy. I've drank a carbonated beverage that Coca Cola sells in South America that was bitter as hell, but apparently someone's buying and drinking it. Americans use Ketchup on all kinds of things, while Brits use brown sauce and vinegar. So called American cheese isn't actually even a cheese, it's a product made from by-products of making real cheese, some people love it while I'll take just about anything else.
I wouldn't recommend Olive Oil for cooking meats unless you're doing a low temperature cooking process. Olive oil has a relatively low smoke point. Safflower is my favorite as it won't start smoking till 510F or 265C.
The fat that melted away is still largely there, it's why those cuts taste so amazing. All that fat breaks down and basically bastes the meat from the inside out. If you cook your steak to the consistency of shoe leather then you've probably gotten rid of most of the fat but also ruined a perfectly delicious steak. It's the marbling in a cut of meat that is important and desirable, the big lumps are just waste and you lose little to nothing by trimming them off.
You could actually get a huge amount of fish from inland waterways here in the USA. A number of river systems are in danger of, or have been overrun by an invasive species of carp from Asia. Catching them isn't a challenge, finding a use for them has been the hangup.
While large, they aren't particularly fatty. Beyond that obesity is a relative measure, so even though a whale might have an 18 inch thick layer of blubber it isn't obese.
The gentrification debate is interesting. I have little to no sympathy for renters because it's a known danger of renting and should always be a part of your decision making. When it comes to property owners I'm a little more sympathetic, but a property owner can simply sell and move on so it should be less of an issue. I can see how that might be a little traumatic for a property owner that is responsible for a property that has been in the family for generations or something, but if you're that established keeping up with the property taxes as they climb shouldn't be that huge.
I can drive five minutes and be in a neighborhood where the houses go for up to half a million. Or I can drive in a different direction and be in an area where homes sell for $15k to $40k.
Disability might be the one welfare system I'd argue for keeping in some form or another. I'd like to see it limited to cases of actual complete or severely crippling disability. I currently know a guy who busted his knee on the job and now can't comprehend the idea of finding some other kind of work. He wants to sit around watching deluxe cable TV all day instead of finding a way to work that doesn't require walking or standing all day, and frankly that's BS. If I developed carpal tunnel I wouldn't expect everyone to give me a free pass and support my current standard of living. I'd adjust my standard of living, possibly moving, and or find some other line of work.
So far as the importance of living where you've always lived, that's some kind of imaginary right that people delude themselves into thinking exists. Maybe in the case of someone who relies on family or friends for daily care it's significant enough to worry about as a society, but otherwise screw them. The number of locations in the country where you can't find a very cheap place to live within a 2 hour drive of a very affluent location is vanishingly small. When I moved out of my parents place I moved less than 20 minutes away and had a housing bill that was probably less than 20% of what my parents were paying. If we quit disproportionately subsidizing peoples outlandish dreams of living in expensive cesspools like NYC the property markets will start to correct themselves.
It all depends on just how basic the basic income is. I would go with something less than $10k per adult per year, regardless of local. So if you want to live in an expensive part of the country without working any extra you're simply not going to make it. At that rate in Average Hometown America, you'd need to have roommates, prepare your own food, and probably ride a bike for transportation. Depending on how the economy turns out to be going we could gradually increase the UBI and maybe if the robot utopia ever comes about we can all live at a luxury level on UBI.
Odds are most people wouldn't be too excited to live in BFE and subsist on the bare minimum, I know I wouldn't. I mean that BFE is fine with me so long as I've got access to the internet with reasonable speeds, and can enjoy my hobbies. It would definitely mean I'd have to keep a job to pay for everything above the basic necessities. But it would mean I would have a lot more freedom in selecting the job I want to do, as going without a job wouldn't be as catastrophic as it is today.
"So you did manage to "remember ever needing to use one.""
Nope, I could have used one, if it weren't broken, but I didn't need it as evidenced by using the the service stations phone. You might as well claim that every time I had to wait for a ride I needed a pay or cell phone to arrange something faster, I didn't need it because I'm patient.
One of my favorite Dr. Seuss lines is "I meant what I said, and I said what I meant." If I make plans with someone and pass the point where I can easily communicate a change in plans, I stick with the last known good plan. I've already admitted the convenience of having a cell phone as it allows for more immediate changes in plans. But not having that crutch is hardly the travesty you seem to believe it is.
Hitch Hiking is and always has been relatively safe. The over hyped fears surrounding it are right up there with the stranger danger myths we perpetuate among children. Not that I'm advocating it as a primary mode of transportation, but the one time I was in a situation to need a ride without a plan a stranger helped me out.
1. A week sounds like a crazy long time to try and store energy reserves for. The only situation I can think of where that would be a likely occurrence with solar would be the far north where you might get snow coverage and for whatever reason don't clear off the panels/mirrors. That said though you'd just need to plan for a larger insulated storage container for the molten salt. The larger the storage container the more economical because the ratio of volume to surface area where you can lose heat favors you.
2. No clue, I'm no expert in this field and just have a passing knowledge of it from having perused Wikipedia some time ago. I can guess though that it'd be a less than ideal solution for solar PV and wind, because you'd be using produced electricity to heat the molten salt, storing the molten salt, and then using the heat from the molten salt to produce electricity again. The type of solar plant that this makes the most sense for is one that focuses the heat of the sun into the molten salt using mirrors as its primary operating mechanic and then you just add enough extra storage capacity to power through periods of darkness or shade. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... If you search for Heat Storage on that page you can find some details.
3. The wiki page above mentions tanks 30 feet tall and 80 feet in diameter being able to provide 100megawatts for 4 hours. If you use the average electricity consumption of the US as a baseline your city of 7m people would need 11.8 gigawatts of continuous power. So you'd need 118 of those tanks, or fewer tanks with a combined volume in the same ballpark, for every 4 hours of total darkness. My rough as hell calculations say something like 17.5 acres of storage tanks for every 4 hour block, if you go with 24 hours of storage it'll take up 420 acres, or about 2/3 of a square mile. All of that is presuming 30x80 foot tanks, you could save a lot of space by going with larger tanks and at least partially burying them. If you scaled these numbers up you could store 24 hours worth of electricity in molten salt tanks occupying just 30 square miles, for the entire USA.
If I needed a ride I arranged it before hand. Sometimes that meant having to wait around for my ride, because I wasn't going to have them show early and wait for me. Sometimes it meant taking public transport instead, riding a bike, or hoofing it on foot. The time I blew up the motor in my car I hitched a ride to the nearest gas station and used the landline there to call a local friend of the family, there was a payphone I would have been told to use if it hadn't been broken.
The home phone is basically a requirement of my employer, which is already annoyed enough that I don't have a cell phone. That despite the fact that I am not an on-call employee.
There are definite advantages to having a cell phone, but it brings a cash cost as well as the electronic leash. For some people they might even be a real necessity, but I think most people could get by without them with little real danger. It's kind of like microwave ovens, you don't really need them, practically everything they do can be done just as well if not better using an oven and stove top, but they are just to convenient for most people to go without.
I think molten salt thermal storage is the other option I remember hearing talked about. Though that would of course work a lot better with a solar plant that does molten salt to begin with instead of PV cells.
Payphones? Even when they were very prevalent I can't remember ever needing to use one. Over the last 20 years I've had cell phones at times and they were convenient. I haven't had one for the last 7+ years and can think of very few instances when I could have really used one. Periodically I think about getting a pay as you go phone to stash in my glove box just in case, but even that expense just doesn't seem worth it. If I could get my relatives and work to learn how to use email and such properly I'd be tempted to kill the landline phone.
The selection is almost unbelievably bad, especially considering they're selling it separately now. We got Prime for the shipping perks because it's an actual savings given how much we order stuff online. I definitely could not recommend prime video at this time.
There were some Navy and Marine troops at the tech school I attended during my stint. I will never forget seeing a formation of mixed sex marines stomping past a formation I was in. The WM's had arms bigger than my legs and honestly the only way they stood out from the males was that they were shorter on average.
I won't argue that salaries don't have an impact, but I think there are bigger money problems. Namely that security is literally always the last consideration before a system is brought online. As a result security ends up becoming more about justifying leaving vulnerabilities open than fixing them. Fixing known security holes often involves changing the way a system actually functions and plenty of risk for lengthy down times and outages when things don't go smoothly. Better funding can mitigate a lot of this but it only goes so far because if you get funded well then congress is likely to want a face to face whenever something goes wrong. Everyone is risk averse, and sadly their biggest perceived risk is getting called in to explain to congress why their application broke. In theory security has the teeth to pull an application from the network if it fails to meet specific standards, in practice I've never even heard of it happening.
My Father served in Vietnam as a medic. He said the only person he saw die that he felt no sympathy for was another medic who was known to inject ditch water into the brains of VC prisoners they were obliged to treat.
They were flying low with the doors open for whatever reason when their helicopter took some small arms fire. The guy was struck in the leg and fell out the door because he was too cocky to wear a safety harness.
While countries can be largely knocked off the internet by severing their physical connections, that isn't really the question at issue. The panel was asking about eliminating the ability for terrorists to organize and recruit over the internet, especially through the dark web. The reason this goal isn't the same as cutting off a country's access is that extremists aren't neatly limited to national boundaries and they certainly don't mind those borders when establishing websites for recruitment. It's the same basic problem that terrorists always pose, they are generally indistinguishable from the general public until such time as is too late.
The thing is I've found DIY instructions going back at least as far as the first announcement of the RIFT KS campaign. Those plans called for readily available and relatively cheap parts, that were basically plug and play. The two sticky points of the builds were the fragility of the LCD screen panel, and tweaking the software to give you side by side images. It might not work with games that weren't or haven't been designed with 3D in mind but from what I've read will readily work with anything done in Unity. For everything else it should be a matter of working with the mainstream graphics drivers 3D support.
What magic is their API supposed to be doing that is worth a $300+ markup? For a commercial finished product I would expect these things to cost around $300 to $400 with maybe a cheap out version at $250. The price is especially galling in view of the fact they are using AMOLED screens which are likely to have burnin within a couple years, and you can bet on them not making it easy to swap out the screen panels. I'm willing to spend a couple hundred bucks once or twice a decade for a monitor upgrade, but spending triple that for a viewing device that'll last a small fraction of that time is crazy.
Second hand is pretty much a loss with Kindles. It is easy enough to get digital copies for anything but I don't think anyone sells 2nd hand digital copies. You could in theory buy 2nd hand and then digitize your copy but that's a good bit of work and equipment you'll need. I keep thinking about it and the wife keeps telling me there's no space for it.
Bookselves, I got married and now instead of an entire wall of shelves, I'm allotted one and a half shelves. While my kindle does have limited storage space it can hold far more than my shelves reasonably could. And my kindle keeps it all neatly organized and searchable.
The kindle definitely represents a minor investment in hardware which can then be at risk. That said in the 20+ years that I've been reading a lot I've only ever lost one book and water damaged another. In my entire life I've only lost one pair of eyeglasses, I've had a prescription since I was 4. Maybe some people are more prone to losing or breaking things, but it hasn't been an issue for me.
Trading ebooks can be done readily enough I suppose. All of the titles I own are available and stored on my devices as DRM free files that can be shuffled around however you like. I suppose there are DRM'd titles out there, and probably simple methods of striping that DRM. So far as legal ways of trading ebook licenses, I have no clue, though if I bothered to read the legal wording of amazons terms of use there is probably something about being prohibited from reselling or trading ebooks.
A kindle isn't an ebook, it is a reader device for ebooks. The kindle I own today is unlikely to be functional in 70 years. However there is no reason to suppose that I won't have ready access to all of my ebooks that I've purchased or procured in 70 years. They are largely just text files with some formatting. At the most I would expect that at some point they might have to be run through a bit of software to be converted to a more modern format. In the meantime though I can have and store as many copies of those files as I like, in whatever fashion I like.
Kindles are cheap enough and killer features rare enough that I don't know that there would be much point in a trade in/up program. Swapping a battery would undoubtedly be more complicated than the same procedure for a smoke detector, but I don't see why you couldn't do it though you'd probably need some special plastic pry tools and a youtube tutorial.
If you sell your kindle the new owner would have a couple options. When you setup a kindle you register it to an Amazon account. The new owner could register it to themselves, at which point the device may wipe whatever content it held and sync with the new owners account. I'm not really sure about it wiping, but the new owner could just hook it up with a usb cable and download everything they wanted to keep, that you left on there. Alternatively the new owner could leave it registered to you, and just manually load whatever ebooks they want via usb cable and sync with your Amazon content. Again, so far as I know there isn't any officially authorized way to transfer legal ownership of ebook files.
I keep my Kindle in the car I drive to work everyday. When I take my sanity/lunch break I read while I eat. When the weather is nice, it's great to sit outside and enjoy reading a book. The crazy battery life is very handy as I can leave it in the car for a month at least between charges, it's one less thing to remember everyday. I can definitely see the draw of a tablet, but I also consider the Kindle to be cheap enough for a single use device.
"Will women be relieved that all the jerks have gone off with their sexbots and aren't bothering them anymore?"
This brings to mind the saying "Everything is about sex, except sex, that's about power." I've probably got that wrong but it's how I remember it going.
I think in many cases men who are jerks to women, seemingly only in it to get laid, are behaving that way to feel power over someone else. If it were only about getting their rocks off they'd utilize other more expedient methods to save money, time, and drama. So while anatomically functional robots might reduce this problem I don't think it'd be a large change.
My experience here is pretty limited by my one anecdote is from a friend who worked as a park ranger. He wanted to transition to being a regular Sheriff's deputy. On one of his ride alongs the deputy he was with made a stop to collect some free service from a prostitute. When he tried to bring it up with the sergeant he was shutdown and was soon removed from the program.
My guess would be that local LEO's are frequently entangled on some level with illegal prostitution in their areas. Any serious scrutiny from uninvolved LEO's is likely to stir up that history. Consequentially it is easier to ignore it and maintain the status quo. Maybe they make a show of busting some johns and prostitutes on an occasional basis, but otherwise if it's out of sight it's out of mind.