I fully expect that Trump will eventually sign a trade deal with China, and he'll probably include Russia while he's at it. He'll call it the USRCA, USCRA, RUSCA, or something like that. And when you look at the actual details of that trade deal, it's going to read very similar if not be a near perfect copy of the TPP. But it'll have US in the name.
The $7500 EV tax credit was put in place by an Act of Congress. Only another Act of Congress can repeal it - the Trump Administration cannot unilaterally order it's removal.
Otoh, there's a possibility that Kudlow might just be spitballing that by 2021 all the major vehicle manufacturers will have sold their 500k's worth of eligible vehicles triggering the tax credit's automatic phase out.
Trump "renegotiated" NAFTA as basically the same deal with a few minor tweaks - no significant overhaul to agriculture or manufacturing imports. Who wants to bet that whatever trade deal (if any) gets signed with China is going to be an almost mirror image of the TPP named the US China Agreement or something?
Remember, there's a world of other places for China to get it's soybeans and other agricultural products, and all of Europe, Asia, and the rest of the Americas to ship it's smart devices to. It's US producers and consumers that are primarily being hurt by Trump's tariffs, not China.
Negotiating from a place of strength is smart business tactics, but that's not where the US is right now. We have nothing China needs that they can't find elsewhere.
Well, software engineering isn't really something that you have to be on site for. If tech companies are restricted from hiring the staff they need and can't otherwise fill the positions then they'll move their headquarters overseas. In other words, restricting these visas will have the same net effect as Trump's tariffs. Some jobs will indeed go to American workers like the 600 steel workers being hired for a new plant. But that isn't going to outweigh the number of jobs lost as companies move overseas. Ex: GM closing 5 plants and cutting 15,000 jobs.
Side note: watch how Mar-a-lago either gets an exemption from any restrictions on hiring foreign workers or how no changes are made to the H1-A visa program.
Project Fi can be a little iffy at times. But, compared to just T-Mobile (which I used to be on) it stands a bit higher on the coverage map. And they've designed it so that it can use Wifi to supplement it's coverage quite well (Pixel phones also come with Google's "Wifi Assistant" which will auto-connect to verified open wifi networks and use a Google VPN to secure your traffic). T-Mobile also had a wifi calling option, but, I didn't have that great an experience with it in practice.
It didn't stop them from implementing FOSTA-SESTA. They've got their loophole: the government doesn't censor the site directly, they make the ISPs liable if they don't censor it for them.
That'd be awesome if so, and I think anyone that's ever had to resort to buying an item at an inflated price off of ebay in order to get it in a reasonable time frame will agree. I'm sure someone is going to come in here and say that it's against the free market, but why should someone just be able to run a script and then walk into a walmart and carry out the entire stock of game consoles only to resell them at twice the price on ebay? Did they do any of the work to create those consoles, advertise them, or bring them to market? Absolutely not. So they shouldn't be able to benefit off someone else's hard work.
Since humanity has pretty much overridden many of the facets of natural selection in the human race with our medical technologies, gene editing like this is probably about the only way we're going to evolve as a species. Future generations could be free of genetic diseases, obesity, and have extended life spans. Assuming the religious nuts don't go to war on it.
Certainly there are some ethical concerns - ie what if the modifications cause a child to be born with massive defects, extreme pain, or a short life span. The scientists performing the work will have to be very careful with the modifications they make to avoid something like that from happening, but I think as long as they take proper care in their work that it shouldn't. It's also worth asking the question, if we have the technology, is it ethical to not try and cure genetic diseases/etc and let children suffer that could otherwise have been free of illness? Certainly this case at least falls under that umbrella.
A capitalistic system of telcos is going to focus their infrastructure building where they can make the most return on investment. In other words areas with the highest population density. They'll also happily employ any technology they can (ie ADSL, etc) to enable broadband over existing copper infrastructure since it's relatively low cost for them and gives them near monopolistic access to a customer base in many areas. Running actual fiber lines costing thousands of dollars to the middle of nowhere so they can pick up five more broadband customers is not going to be very high on their priority list though.
One hope for rural broadband might come in the form of some kind of low orbit satellite endeavour, like SpaceX's Starlink service - if it ever gets off the ground and they can get the costs under control enough in order to get a return on the investment.
The better possibility would probably be for local municipalities to decide to use their own tax dollars to build their own fiber infrastructure if broadband in their area is a priority. Wire the town with fiber, and connect into the nearest backbone using whatever method is available. Anyone with a farm house in the middle of some gigantic acreage however is still probably going to have to deal with ADSL over copper, unless they want to lay the fiber themselves.
I said should because I didn't feel like researching half a dozen articles to back up my claim and half remembered hearsay. I also don't have empirical data on hand to back up my maintenance claims. You see, when I make assumptions I don't make my statements as if they were facts even if I have common sense reasoning to back them up.
It should also be worth considering that an EV's power train should be significantly less complicated than that of an ICE vehicle. Less complicated/less moving parts = easier and less costly to maintain. It can also result in a smaller footprint necessary for the vehicle, although most people seem to have a thing against vehicles that don't have the same form factor as traditional cars.
Newegg allows marketplace sellers these days as well (though I doubt they offer a "Fulfillment by Newegg" option similar to the "Fulfillment by Amazon" option offered to Amazon zSellers).
Not that this isn't clearly still anti-competitive behavior. It was one thing when Amazon refused to carry Google products that were directly competing with it's own Fire products (although it was still kind of shitty of them to block third parties from selling them as well). But this is Amazon making a deal with another company, Apple, to muscle out the competition.
I see a lot of talk comparing the sum cost of streaming services being higher than the price of cable, and they are absolutely right. If you subscribe to everything it is. But, here's the catch: most subscription based streaming services operate with No Commercials during the stream. You get to binge watch an entire series without seeing a single commercial. Cable TV is heavily subsidized by advertisements.
The second thing I see a lot of people doing is including the cost of internet service with the cost of subscription streaming services and saying that it's much higher than the cost of cable, and it is. But, what they ignore is the fact that most people are buying internet service regardless of whether or not they have cable TV service. Now, you might opt for more bandwidth/larger caps/unlimited when you "cut the cord", but that's not necessarily something people wouldn't do anyway.
The third thing: streaming services are for the most part not directly comparable to cable. When it comes to cable you watch what they broadcast when they broadcast it (or you DVR it and watch it shortly there after). Some stations will let you stream episodes from their websites shortly after broadcast, but access still tends to be restricted (and I'd bet those streams are laden with commercials just like the on air broadcast). Streaming services are more analogous to a library. You get to browse the content and pick and choose what you want to watch, when you want to watch it, no matter how much of it you want to watch.
Now, are multiple streaming services anti-consumer? It certainly feels like it when previously Disney licensed it's library to Netflix and now they're pulling it all off and demanding you pay them more money if you want to watch any of it. But, you also have to admit that by doing that Disney is going to put it's money where it's mouth is and produce more content for it's service to keep people engaged than they would have if they just continued licensing their library to Netflix. So, there's pluses and minuses to the change. Ultimately, it's a decision that you the consumer have to make with your wallet. If their service flounders then they'll probably go back to licensing to the other services. If it takes off, then they'll end up producing more content.
I was going to say that dangers in this sense was meant to be 'dangers to the lines' but then I realized that the FiOS line to my house is hung on telephone poles, so I don't know what dangers it could be more susceptible to than regular TV cables.
I could see long run fiber optics being more expensive than other cables though, not just in the cost of the cabling itself but also the cost of signal repeaters.
I think this issue may be a bit more complicated than you might think. On the face, it certainly doesn't make any sense whatsoever for goods from China and other third world countries to ship so cheaply into the US. But, American consumers have benefited significantly from this, though it came at the expense of American factory workers whose jobs are long long gone.
If you up-end the shipping rates from third world countries (because if you mess with just the shipping rate from China then they'll just find some other third world country to funnel products through so you have to mess with all of them) the average American consumer who is already struggling is the one that's going to end up footing the bill for substantially more expensive products. Eventually some manufacturing jobs may move back inside US borders as the higher price of goods makes setting up a heavily automated factory worth the investment, but that'll take years in transition and the number of jobs created will be insignificant to the impact of the increased cost of living.
It's worth noting that many of those third world countries don't have the kinds of regulations and worker protections that the US has (even though many of our protections have been getting eroded, especially under the current administration though it's been slowly happening for decades). So American consumers are benefiting off the back of often horrible labor practices and even child labor in the third world for decades.
If Americans were actually getting paid relative to their productivity then they'd have the wherewithal to afford locally sourced products, even at double or triple the price of imports. Effectively cutting off the US from the global market right now however will have devastating consequences for American consumers in the short term, the same way that the tariffs that have already been implemented have had devastating consequences on mid-western farmers and the auto industry. We need to fix the income inequality in our country first, and I don't see threatening postal rates on imports and setting up tariffs as having any meaningful impact on that problem. Granted, in order to fix the income inequality in our country we need to stop our corporations from buying off most of our politicians and reverse their decimation of organized labor.
Part of the problem that lowers the birthrate is the high cost of having a child in an industrialized nation. Economically, in first world countries children are a liability, not an asset. And when you squeeze the middle class while slashing child care and assistance programs like we have in the US there's fewer and fewer families that can afford to raise children outside of abject poverty.
Incompetent?
Can you please tell me the level of Unemployment prevailing at this moment?
Trying to use the unemployment rate as an example of Trump's competency doesn't make a very good argument.
Just look at the 10 year graph of the unemployment rate https://tradingeconomics.com/u...
All Trump managed to do is not screw up the trend that very clearly was established under the previous president.
And it's the same for wage growth: https://tradingeconomics.com/u... although when you compare/contrast vs inflation https://tradingeconomics.com/u... real world wage growth has actually decreased the last two years vs the previous two years.
You can try arguing GDP next, but, https://tradingeconomics.com/u...https://tradingeconomics.com/u... again we're mostly still seeing the same kind of numbers/trends that began in mid/late 2010.
Now, lets have a look at something that did drastically change under Trump, Health Insurance. https://tradingeconomics.com/u...
See that big giant increase in the price index at the end of 2017 compared to the rest of the graph? That's the result of the GOP gutting parts of the ACA and Trump refusing to pay out the by law guaranteed Medicare/Medicaid subsidies.
Okay, I'm sure you want something to criticize the previous president for, so here we go: https://tradingeconomics.com/u...
Those are some pretty bad deficit numbers under Obama's first few years. The country hadn't run that big an annual deficit since WW2. On the other hand, he used that deficit to drag the country out of a pretty bad economic recession left behind by the W Bush administration and managed to decrease it back down to 2008 levels by the end of his term. Unfortunately, instead of the deficit continuing to go down under Trump, it's gone up instead thanks to a massive tax give away to the rich and corporations. https://tradingeconomics.com/u...
My bad, I guess that wasn't as much of a criticism of the last guy as the graph initially made it out to be.
Ok, here's one we can really criticize Obama for, excessively increased military spending: https://tradingeconomics.com/u...... or can we?
Oops, sorry. I guess it was actually Bush who decided to start a war in Iraq in 2003 that didn't end until they hauled out Bin Laden in 2011. Oh, let's not forget the War on Terror in Afghanistan from 2001-2014 either, that at least in was in response to us being attacked first on 9/11. Except, 15 out of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia...
Or are you just projecting your personal wrath over YouTube frame drop after you shelled out for a $5000 graphics card? (Never mind $10 billion.)
I have no idea what you're talking about. I simply commented on the sad state of affairs of an important, unique, and historic piece of science equipment potentially becoming permanently inoperable with no replacement or potential fix viable in the immediate future. Sure, it was only a matter of time until it broke down, but, at least the last time it broke down we still had a shuttle they could send up to fix it.
Or maybe you're one of those who think pure science is a complete waste of money and everything that doesn't have an immediate quantifiable return on investment should be outlawed.
This could be pretty bad news for NASA if they can't manage to jury rig something. Hubble's successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, isn't scheduled for launch until 2021. Though I suppose they could try to do another repair mission on the Hubble like they did in '93 and four other times since (the last was 2009), but, that was back before they retired the space shuttle in 2011. Doing another maintenance run on the Hubble is probably beyond the spec/capabilities of the first manned SpaceX launch, currently planned for mid 2019.
Quite easily actually. It's called advertising. Not to mention decades of selling fast food meals that have enough calories in them for an entire day not just one meal. Check out the history regarding the size of wine glasses over time as an example. It's very easy to psychologically trick people into consuming both the wrong foods and too much of the wrong foods and they've been doing it for decades. Sure, they're not forcing anyone to do so, but it's plenty effective all the same, all in the name of increasing their corporate bottom line.
I think it's more likely that the rich and powerful will fund outer space development until they can leave the planet behind to live in a luxury space station. Alternatively, they'll build biodomes here on the earth's surface that won't be as susceptible to climate chaos. In the end, they'll continue to exploit the labor class while living privileged and pampered lives while the rest of humanity dies in the dirt.
Granted, there are also other potential outcomes. If a massive worldwide epidemic wipes out half the human population, that will drastically lower emission levels. Not sure our current societies can survive that level of collapse, but, maybe. I wouldn't even put it past some governments to be engineering such an epidemic right now...
Slashdot Mirror
I fully expect that Trump will eventually sign a trade deal with China, and he'll probably include Russia while he's at it. He'll call it the USRCA, USCRA, RUSCA, or something like that. And when you look at the actual details of that trade deal, it's going to read very similar if not be a near perfect copy of the TPP. But it'll have US in the name.
The $7500 EV tax credit was put in place by an Act of Congress. Only another Act of Congress can repeal it - the Trump Administration cannot unilaterally order it's removal.
Otoh, there's a possibility that Kudlow might just be spitballing that by 2021 all the major vehicle manufacturers will have sold their 500k's worth of eligible vehicles triggering the tax credit's automatic phase out.
Trump "renegotiated" NAFTA as basically the same deal with a few minor tweaks - no significant overhaul to agriculture or manufacturing imports. Who wants to bet that whatever trade deal (if any) gets signed with China is going to be an almost mirror image of the TPP named the US China Agreement or something?
Remember, there's a world of other places for China to get it's soybeans and other agricultural products, and all of Europe, Asia, and the rest of the Americas to ship it's smart devices to. It's US producers and consumers that are primarily being hurt by Trump's tariffs, not China.
Negotiating from a place of strength is smart business tactics, but that's not where the US is right now. We have nothing China needs that they can't find elsewhere.
Well, software engineering isn't really something that you have to be on site for. If tech companies are restricted from hiring the staff they need and can't otherwise fill the positions then they'll move their headquarters overseas. In other words, restricting these visas will have the same net effect as Trump's tariffs. Some jobs will indeed go to American workers like the 600 steel workers being hired for a new plant. But that isn't going to outweigh the number of jobs lost as companies move overseas. Ex: GM closing 5 plants and cutting 15,000 jobs.
Side note: watch how Mar-a-lago either gets an exemption from any restrictions on hiring foreign workers or how no changes are made to the H1-A visa program.
Project Fi can be a little iffy at times. But, compared to just T-Mobile (which I used to be on) it stands a bit higher on the coverage map. And they've designed it so that it can use Wifi to supplement it's coverage quite well (Pixel phones also come with Google's "Wifi Assistant" which will auto-connect to verified open wifi networks and use a Google VPN to secure your traffic). T-Mobile also had a wifi calling option, but, I didn't have that great an experience with it in practice.
It didn't stop them from implementing FOSTA-SESTA. They've got their loophole: the government doesn't censor the site directly, they make the ISPs liable if they don't censor it for them.
That'd be awesome if so, and I think anyone that's ever had to resort to buying an item at an inflated price off of ebay in order to get it in a reasonable time frame will agree. I'm sure someone is going to come in here and say that it's against the free market, but why should someone just be able to run a script and then walk into a walmart and carry out the entire stock of game consoles only to resell them at twice the price on ebay? Did they do any of the work to create those consoles, advertise them, or bring them to market? Absolutely not. So they shouldn't be able to benefit off someone else's hard work.
Since humanity has pretty much overridden many of the facets of natural selection in the human race with our medical technologies, gene editing like this is probably about the only way we're going to evolve as a species. Future generations could be free of genetic diseases, obesity, and have extended life spans. Assuming the religious nuts don't go to war on it.
Certainly there are some ethical concerns - ie what if the modifications cause a child to be born with massive defects, extreme pain, or a short life span. The scientists performing the work will have to be very careful with the modifications they make to avoid something like that from happening, but I think as long as they take proper care in their work that it shouldn't. It's also worth asking the question, if we have the technology, is it ethical to not try and cure genetic diseases/etc and let children suffer that could otherwise have been free of illness? Certainly this case at least falls under that umbrella.
A capitalistic system of telcos is going to focus their infrastructure building where they can make the most return on investment. In other words areas with the highest population density. They'll also happily employ any technology they can (ie ADSL, etc) to enable broadband over existing copper infrastructure since it's relatively low cost for them and gives them near monopolistic access to a customer base in many areas. Running actual fiber lines costing thousands of dollars to the middle of nowhere so they can pick up five more broadband customers is not going to be very high on their priority list though.
One hope for rural broadband might come in the form of some kind of low orbit satellite endeavour, like SpaceX's Starlink service - if it ever gets off the ground and they can get the costs under control enough in order to get a return on the investment.
The better possibility would probably be for local municipalities to decide to use their own tax dollars to build their own fiber infrastructure if broadband in their area is a priority. Wire the town with fiber, and connect into the nearest backbone using whatever method is available. Anyone with a farm house in the middle of some gigantic acreage however is still probably going to have to deal with ADSL over copper, unless they want to lay the fiber themselves.
I said should because I didn't feel like researching half a dozen articles to back up my claim and half remembered hearsay. I also don't have empirical data on hand to back up my maintenance claims. You see, when I make assumptions I don't make my statements as if they were facts even if I have common sense reasoning to back them up.
It should also be worth considering that an EV's power train should be significantly less complicated than that of an ICE vehicle. Less complicated/less moving parts = easier and less costly to maintain. It can also result in a smaller footprint necessary for the vehicle, although most people seem to have a thing against vehicles that don't have the same form factor as traditional cars.
Newegg allows marketplace sellers these days as well (though I doubt they offer a "Fulfillment by Newegg" option similar to the "Fulfillment by Amazon" option offered to Amazon zSellers).
Not that this isn't clearly still anti-competitive behavior. It was one thing when Amazon refused to carry Google products that were directly competing with it's own Fire products (although it was still kind of shitty of them to block third parties from selling them as well). But this is Amazon making a deal with another company, Apple, to muscle out the competition.
In hindsight, I guess I found more than one thing to remember.
I see a lot of talk comparing the sum cost of streaming services being higher than the price of cable, and they are absolutely right. If you subscribe to everything it is. But, here's the catch: most subscription based streaming services operate with No Commercials during the stream. You get to binge watch an entire series without seeing a single commercial. Cable TV is heavily subsidized by advertisements.
The second thing I see a lot of people doing is including the cost of internet service with the cost of subscription streaming services and saying that it's much higher than the cost of cable, and it is. But, what they ignore is the fact that most people are buying internet service regardless of whether or not they have cable TV service. Now, you might opt for more bandwidth/larger caps/unlimited when you "cut the cord", but that's not necessarily something people wouldn't do anyway.
The third thing: streaming services are for the most part not directly comparable to cable. When it comes to cable you watch what they broadcast when they broadcast it (or you DVR it and watch it shortly there after). Some stations will let you stream episodes from their websites shortly after broadcast, but access still tends to be restricted (and I'd bet those streams are laden with commercials just like the on air broadcast). Streaming services are more analogous to a library. You get to browse the content and pick and choose what you want to watch, when you want to watch it, no matter how much of it you want to watch.
Now, are multiple streaming services anti-consumer? It certainly feels like it when previously Disney licensed it's library to Netflix and now they're pulling it all off and demanding you pay them more money if you want to watch any of it. But, you also have to admit that by doing that Disney is going to put it's money where it's mouth is and produce more content for it's service to keep people engaged than they would have if they just continued licensing their library to Netflix. So, there's pluses and minuses to the change. Ultimately, it's a decision that you the consumer have to make with your wallet. If their service flounders then they'll probably go back to licensing to the other services. If it takes off, then they'll end up producing more content.
I think what little is left of the Native Americans would sharply disagree.
“Meeting an advanced civilization could be like Native Americans encountering Columbus. That didn’t turn out so well.”
I was going to say that dangers in this sense was meant to be 'dangers to the lines' but then I realized that the FiOS line to my house is hung on telephone poles, so I don't know what dangers it could be more susceptible to than regular TV cables.
I could see long run fiber optics being more expensive than other cables though, not just in the cost of the cabling itself but also the cost of signal repeaters.
I think this issue may be a bit more complicated than you might think. On the face, it certainly doesn't make any sense whatsoever for goods from China and other third world countries to ship so cheaply into the US. But, American consumers have benefited significantly from this, though it came at the expense of American factory workers whose jobs are long long gone.
If you up-end the shipping rates from third world countries (because if you mess with just the shipping rate from China then they'll just find some other third world country to funnel products through so you have to mess with all of them) the average American consumer who is already struggling is the one that's going to end up footing the bill for substantially more expensive products. Eventually some manufacturing jobs may move back inside US borders as the higher price of goods makes setting up a heavily automated factory worth the investment, but that'll take years in transition and the number of jobs created will be insignificant to the impact of the increased cost of living.
It's worth noting that many of those third world countries don't have the kinds of regulations and worker protections that the US has (even though many of our protections have been getting eroded, especially under the current administration though it's been slowly happening for decades). So American consumers are benefiting off the back of often horrible labor practices and even child labor in the third world for decades.
If Americans were actually getting paid relative to their productivity then they'd have the wherewithal to afford locally sourced products, even at double or triple the price of imports. Effectively cutting off the US from the global market right now however will have devastating consequences for American consumers in the short term, the same way that the tariffs that have already been implemented have had devastating consequences on mid-western farmers and the auto industry. We need to fix the income inequality in our country first, and I don't see threatening postal rates on imports and setting up tariffs as having any meaningful impact on that problem. Granted, in order to fix the income inequality in our country we need to stop our corporations from buying off most of our politicians and reverse their decimation of organized labor.
Part of the problem that lowers the birthrate is the high cost of having a child in an industrialized nation. Economically, in first world countries children are a liability, not an asset. And when you squeeze the middle class while slashing child care and assistance programs like we have in the US there's fewer and fewer families that can afford to raise children outside of abject poverty.
Incompetent? Can you please tell me the level of Unemployment prevailing at this moment?
Trying to use the unemployment rate as an example of Trump's competency doesn't make a very good argument.
... or can we?
Just look at the 10 year graph of the unemployment rate https://tradingeconomics.com/u...
All Trump managed to do is not screw up the trend that very clearly was established under the previous president.
And it's the same for wage growth: https://tradingeconomics.com/u... although when you compare/contrast vs inflation https://tradingeconomics.com/u... real world wage growth has actually decreased the last two years vs the previous two years.
You can try arguing GDP next, but, https://tradingeconomics.com/u... https://tradingeconomics.com/u... again we're mostly still seeing the same kind of numbers/trends that began in mid/late 2010.
Now, lets have a look at something that did drastically change under Trump, Health Insurance. https://tradingeconomics.com/u...
See that big giant increase in the price index at the end of 2017 compared to the rest of the graph? That's the result of the GOP gutting parts of the ACA and Trump refusing to pay out the by law guaranteed Medicare/Medicaid subsidies.
Okay, I'm sure you want something to criticize the previous president for, so here we go: https://tradingeconomics.com/u...
Those are some pretty bad deficit numbers under Obama's first few years. The country hadn't run that big an annual deficit since WW2. On the other hand, he used that deficit to drag the country out of a pretty bad economic recession left behind by the W Bush administration and managed to decrease it back down to 2008 levels by the end of his term. Unfortunately, instead of the deficit continuing to go down under Trump, it's gone up instead thanks to a massive tax give away to the rich and corporations. https://tradingeconomics.com/u...
My bad, I guess that wasn't as much of a criticism of the last guy as the graph initially made it out to be.
Ok, here's one we can really criticize Obama for, excessively increased military spending: https://tradingeconomics.com/u...
Oops, sorry. I guess it was actually Bush who decided to start a war in Iraq in 2003 that didn't end until they hauled out Bin Laden in 2011. Oh, let's not forget the War on Terror in Afghanistan from 2001-2014 either, that at least in was in response to us being attacked first on 9/11. Except, 15 out of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia...
Congress owes Disney royalties for stealing it's copyrighted ideology on extending copyrights. RIP "Public Domain"
Or are you just projecting your personal wrath over YouTube frame drop after you shelled out for a $5000 graphics card? (Never mind $10 billion.)
I have no idea what you're talking about. I simply commented on the sad state of affairs of an important, unique, and historic piece of science equipment potentially becoming permanently inoperable with no replacement or potential fix viable in the immediate future. Sure, it was only a matter of time until it broke down, but, at least the last time it broke down we still had a shuttle they could send up to fix it.
Or maybe you're one of those who think pure science is a complete waste of money and everything that doesn't have an immediate quantifiable return on investment should be outlawed.
This could be pretty bad news for NASA if they can't manage to jury rig something. Hubble's successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, isn't scheduled for launch until 2021. Though I suppose they could try to do another repair mission on the Hubble like they did in '93 and four other times since (the last was 2009), but, that was back before they retired the space shuttle in 2011. Doing another maintenance run on the Hubble is probably beyond the spec/capabilities of the first manned SpaceX launch, currently planned for mid 2019.
Quite easily actually. It's called advertising. Not to mention decades of selling fast food meals that have enough calories in them for an entire day not just one meal. Check out the history regarding the size of wine glasses over time as an example. It's very easy to psychologically trick people into consuming both the wrong foods and too much of the wrong foods and they've been doing it for decades. Sure, they're not forcing anyone to do so, but it's plenty effective all the same, all in the name of increasing their corporate bottom line.
I think it's more likely that the rich and powerful will fund outer space development until they can leave the planet behind to live in a luxury space station. Alternatively, they'll build biodomes here on the earth's surface that won't be as susceptible to climate chaos. In the end, they'll continue to exploit the labor class while living privileged and pampered lives while the rest of humanity dies in the dirt.
Granted, there are also other potential outcomes. If a massive worldwide epidemic wipes out half the human population, that will drastically lower emission levels. Not sure our current societies can survive that level of collapse, but, maybe. I wouldn't even put it past some governments to be engineering such an epidemic right now...