Is this the sort of negative mass that would possibly allow for stable wormholes and therefore time travel?

Wait, so this is the sort of Conservative place that’s voting for Harris? I’m not judging (I wouldn’t call Trump a conservative) but I am surprised.

When the Soviets and the Americans reached each other, that meant that there were no more Nazis left in between and if I were in that situation I think I would be kissing anyone and everyone.

Is that something other men want to do? Even my dog had no interest in it and he was easily flexible enough.

It has been a while since I went to college but I don’t remember college robotics classes building robots capable of bipedal motion at all.

I don’t think it is intended to replace busses for the public. My guess is that the target market is companies that offer private ride shares to their employees.

Looks like someone has been snacking too greedily…

What’s the arched piece of metal over the forehead for? I thought that armor intended for combat use generally didn’t have things on it that would be easy for an opponent to grab.

I don’t think that the total number of “preferences being inflicted on others” is a constant. The more people leave each other alone, the fewer preferences are being inflicted (unless you count the preference against having preferences inflicted, which I suppose some people would). The electoral college isn’t inherently a libertarian institution, but it does at least keep the national government from acting with effectively no concern for the preferences of people who live in small states. (If only there was a way to protect the people in small states without giving them the outsized influence over the people in big states that the electoral college does…)

from within 5 minutes of where you live and goes to within 5 minutes of where you want to be

That’s technically true where I live but it would require waiting for a local bus at each end of most trips, and that’s usually slower than walking.

I talked to an older relative from the Soviet Union about gay marriage and she told me that on the one hand, it seems strange that something she had been raised to view as a mental illness was now getting official recognition, but on the other hand there were always people like the two nice guys she used to work with who were best friends, lived together, and never found the right women to marry…

(She did work in a metallurgical plant but those guys were probably engineers rather than burly steelworkers.)

She also said that she didn’t like the Chinese engineers sent to visit her plant because they smiled too much. A similar thing happened when my family came to the USA, before we got used to things here. I recall my mother being bothered that a cashier had smiled at her because the cashier didn’t know her and had no reason to be happy to see her.

My impression is that the robo-van is intended to be a taxi with some ride-sharing capabilities.

The Robovan is intended for the company’s Tesla Network, an autonomous ridehailing service for purpose-built self-driving cars

I am of two minds about this.

On the one hand, I am a deracinated individual. I live in a building with about a thousand other people, I don’t know any of them, and I don’t want to know any of them. I am only a little more connected to the city and state that I live in, because I don’t like the city and the state (whereas I simply don’t care about my neighbors in the building). Therefore, I am inclined to count people equally because

communities of place, belief and walk of life

simply don’t exist for me (at least not in the physical world).

On the other hand, I hate being told what to do, and I especially hate it when someone far away feels that his principles entitle him to interfere in my business. The state-level fight for high-density zoning in California is a good example of this. Towns vote against permitting high-density zoning, but people far away who don’t know or care about the residents of those towns want to force the towns to permit that high-density zoning in order to accomplish the things that the people far away want in the abstract but the people living in those towns would actually have to suffer the consequences of. This perspective does lead me to feel that small areas where people with a minority opinion actually form the majority do need to be protected.

I think the ideal solution would be to elect a president via a nationwide popular vote but also to make a deep commitment to libertarian principles of leaving people alone to live their lives as they see fit. (I expect that the latter is even less likely than the former.)

A robo-taxi is private, arrives when you call it, and goes directly from where you are to where you want to be. I don’t see the similarities between that and a bus or train.

A robot isn’t just software: the hardware for humanoid robots has proved quite difficult to build and if these robots have the hardware necessary to walk around and manipulate objects (in the real world, not in a lab where they get multiple “takes”) then they are remarkable even if their every action is directed by a human.

Also I would have guessed that Hasbro owned the IP for robots named “Optimus”. Maybe Tesla paid them, the way that Verizon paid Lucasfilm for the right to use the word “droid”.

The article is not clear. Did the drone actually hit

a training camp of the Israeli Defence Forces’ (IDF) Golani Brigade

Yeah but then what are the cat ears?

No, the tongs are for when the vacuum wants to take you alive.

Station wagons should have stayed dead.

It’s a good thing none of them were armed…