The Netherlands has 3 times the GDP of the largest economy in Africa. $1.228 Trillion compared to South Africa's $410 million. If you add Africa's total GDP up, the Dutch alone make almost half that. Their land area is about 16K square miles. Africa is almost 12 million square miles.

In wealth production, land size doesn't necessarily matter.

The leadership is a reflection of the culture at large. It starts at the very bottom. If a young man decides to better his station in life, and start a business, the first time he starts getting ahead, his father will swoop in and claim it. Because the culture says that the head of the clan owns everything his wives and offspring produce.

It wasn't westerners that came up with the expression "Africa wins again". It was Africans.

Pebble was acquired by Google and then it got killed internally. Google released the Pebble OS as Open Source last year, and a project to reboot Pebble started around that time. For now, any Pebble watch you see is at least 10 years old.

It's pretty dishonest for the link to group auto accidents with armed robberies, assault, rape, etc. Violence, as a legal definition, is intentional. Accidents, by their very definition, are not.

If we're talking about long-haul semis, then you might have a point. But anything else? Easily replaceable at this point.

Bald eagles in the sky are a natural occurrence. Coms satellites are not.

Spacefaring nations should be held responsible for hauling their dead orbital junk out of the sky. You could do that now with robotic "pusher drones" launched into orbit that are guided from place to place and nudge dead junk into burning up over the ocean.

I did read it. It doesn't state that the dead have rights. It's an argument that they should. And it'll go nowhere. It's not going to turn over centuries of legal standards.

The dead have no rights. Their successors who hold their estate have rights, but not the dead themselves.

Hydrogen is eventually coming one day. Just not for cars. Your grandkids will probably fly on airliners running hydrogen fuel, and there will probably be big power generation facilities running it. But running it on common automobiles cheaply and efficiently is just too big a hump to get over. It's a lot easier for an airport to manage hydrogen than a gas station on the Interstate. As the Japanese have proved, you can do hydrogen automobiles, it's just really, really impractical at that vehicle size. Kind of like Chrysler's 1960's experimentation with gas turbine engines in cars. You can do it, and people will go "Oh, neat", but no one is going to buy one with the hassles involved.

All I want is a mainstream-supported fast, simple, clean browser with an efficient rendering engine. That's it. I don't want an AI "helper". This isn't an Iron Man movie where I'm Tony Fucking Stark talking to JARVIS. And if I wanted an AI to talk to, it wouldn't be a component in my goddam browser.

Build a web portal for that shit and otherwise leave us be.

Hybrids are dead. A new platform takes 3-4 years to develop, and by that time the battery-powered EVs will be able to replace all the regular ICE niches.

The same. DC should be a neutral capitol regardless of who is in power. Any future Democrat, Republican, whoever. James Madison had a good idea when he came up with the concept of the non-state capitol district. Besides, the Constitution mandates that the district is ultimately under the exclusive control of Congress anyway:

The DC home rule act was always a mistake and should be reversed. The whole point of the creation of the District of Columbia as a federal capitol of a union of states is that it would be neutral with no interests of its own, unlike states, existing solely as a place for the federal government to conduct its business on behalf of the other states. "Home Rule" has led to its current state, along with demands for statehood and senators, completely contradicting the explicit purpose of the district. Congress should go back to direct district management. DC was never intended as a normal place to live like everywhere else.

The naivety. As if technology wasn't politicized from the very beginning.

The very fathers of the the computing era were either straight-laced businessmen, or hippy radicals. Both with very different ideas of what technology should do and be in society. Both implementing their worldviews into the companies or movements. From the mainframe makers whose products the West's Cold War infrastructure was based on, to Bay Area rebels that fought to overturn the applecarts, technology has carried politics with it like clouds on the wind since the first vacuum tube.

Every Single Tech Company has tried to influence politics, getting their preferred horses in office, and bend the laws, markets, and governments to their ends. Every. One. To pretend that Google, Oracle, Microsoft, etc, hasn't always tried influence elections and laws is sheer nonsense. To pretend that they've never bent to political pressure from the moment's Powers That Be until now is just as much nonsense. Technology has been political since it's very beginnings. The early "hands off" attitude towards a Wild West Internet was the briefest of anomalies in technology, with all sides soon closing in to shape the Internet in their desired image.

You mean that man who, for his entire life, has made and lost money and then made it again in everything from real estate to entertainment to casinos? The man who has argued all of his life that free enterprise is the solution to so many problems?

Then one would be wrong, because you can't decide what anyone else's best interests are, and it's sheer fucking arrogance to think you can.