The biggest problem with this approach is that no one part of the ATC system exists on its own. All the pieces communicate with each other in an ancient architecture. You can use this approach to upgrade any one piece, but you can never replace the ancient architecture without a much more invasive and risky transition

No. No one knows what's going to happen. That's exactly the problem. Sales taxes, where they exist, inevitably cause prices to be off the 5 cent mark. With no national legislation planned at all and state legislation likely to be slow to have any influence, the effect will be chaos as different vendors, different local jurisdictions, and different states struggle to find an equitable balance.

The best part is that, because nickels cost the US government even more in overhead than pennies do, the whole thing will end up costing the taxpayers far more than it will save them.

But the worst part is that Steven Wright's amazing joke will just disappear:

How come it's a penny for your thoughts but you have to put your two cents in? Somebody's making a penny.

I’ve seen this from personal experience. Pure coding jobs are evaporating; the only way to make a living is by building new products or shifting into sales and marketing related work.

So, the schools were supposed to lead the target and prepare for AI essays? How? Because they're so well funded?

Did you know that horsedrawn taxis were woefully unprepared for the introduction of trolleys and cars? Silly horses!

Why is this even news? Everyone has credentials that have leaked. It’s frustrating, but that’s the risk of using any service these days.

Reforestation is a thing, at least in North America. Since the 1970s, the U.S. has planted millions of acres of new forest (see United Nations FAO and USDA Forest Service for data). The U.S. currently is planting about 60,000 acres of trees annually, plus another 130,000 acres of regeneration.

The people overseeing this work are forestry experts, so one can assume they are planting the correct trees for a locale, in the right concentrations and groupings.

The real problem is that Brazilians are chopping down millions of acres of forest every year (albeit, decreasing). This is insanity. Also, because of food shortages and famines, some Africans have been stripping bark from trees, as well as harvesting the wood. Deforestation of that continent not only removes habitat for fauna (chimps, birds, etc.) but also leads to expansion of desert. Africa's just a total disaster.

the posting software eliminated the subscripts; that should read CO2 and O2 above. :D

About a million tons of plastics are being dumped into the oceans every year, and this material is suspected of damaging the ecosystem. Algae absorb CO and emit O quite efficiently; 60% to 70% of the Earth's oxygen is made this way. Another 10% to 20% or so comes from several huge rain forests, notably the Amazon.

We should focus on eliminating plastic and other potentially damaging substances from the ocean, and secondarily perhaps limit over-fishing that distorts the food chain.

Also, plant more trees. There's no better, or cheaper, way to de-carbon-ify the atmosphere than trees, especially during their major growth years.

This seawater-filtering scheme sounds expensive and strange, and probably would create more problems than it solves.

It's just a small test project, funded by the UK government, a proof of concept. How exactly it will prove the concept, though, is left as an exercise to the reader.

I was primarily responding to the often repeated yet totally false assertion that heat pumps aren't good for cold climate usage or are much more expensive up front. As I noted, neither are true for new construction these days.

Operating cost comparisons vary VERY widely, as you note, but in MOST areas heat pumps are basically cost neutral with natural gas. That isn't true with particularly high electric rates and low natural gas rates.

And if you don't have natural gas, I'd be hard pressed to name any areas that heat pumps won't be significantly cheaper to operate compared to other fossil fuel options you might have.

There are many residential great pump units that can operate well down to deep subzero f temperatures. Backup electric resistance heat for truly extreme events is very cheap.

I've designed many all electric whole house heat pump systems in Maine. It's not necessarily a big upcharge in New construction. It can be harder in retrofit if existing ducting is not adequate, and air to water for hydronic systems is currently still a more significant upcharge.

I had thought quantum entanglement doesn't copy information; it actually realizes the original information at an arbitrary point in space-time (I added the "time" because I believe it's not restricted to 3 dimensions).

The teleportation you describe is much more conventional: a machine scans you down to the molecular level (the mechanism, let alone the amount of data storage, needed to achieve this is left to the imagination), transmits this data to Jupiter, which is an average of 43.2 light minutes from Earth.

The receiving machine then rebuilds a copy of you, molecule by molecule. If the checksum matches, it sends a "Success" response, and the transmitting machine then disassembles the original you.

And for the record, I will never get in one of those things.

The gravity is a nice bonus... but acceleration would need to be maintained at 9.81 m/s to achieve one gee.

To get to 100,000 mph by the midpoint to reach Mars at its closest approach to Earth, per Grok, a = 0.0357 m/s
This is far less than one gee.

Unless I'm doing this wrong.

But luckily, we can have a spinning habitat to simulate gravity. For a six month journey, this would be a necessity; it wouldn't do for the astronauts to reach Mars with atrophied muscles and bones.

What happens to the kinetic energy of the astronaut who is instantly transported to another point in space? Standing on the Earth's surface, we are actually moving at a rather high velocity due to rotation and orbital motion. Just plunk someone down on Mars and they might go flying up, down, or sideways at thousands of km/hour.

The "current crisis" is manufactured and amplified externally. Nobody is doxxing Tesla owners with maps using Molotov cocktails as map cursors or burning lots full of vehicles in for service in some way that is a function of whether Musk is personally present on the factory floor vs doing something else he thinks is vital to our economic survival. All of it is ginned up hate based on the politics surrounding the pruning of vast left slush funds and debt-funded waste that has to go away. That's an entire industry with vested interests, and acting against it certainly brings out the coordinated hate, attacks on stock value, media smearing, and of course thousands of people who now say he's a nazi though they can't actually articulate why they think that.

No, him being "on the factory floor" or off it doesn't precipitate some "current crisis," except in the sense that entrenched interests currently having their oxen gored by drying up things like the NGO money laundering industry are doing their best to try to wreck the company to make a point.