I think Linux is the king of backwards compatibility, in that you can always download an old version of Linux and run your old software stack. Windows forces you to use a new version; Microsoft puts a lot of effort into backwards compatibility but it's always a gamble.
Nuclear was perfectly affordable until laws were passed to make it unaffordable (specifically: if nuclear power happened to be cheaper than other energy sources for any reason, then it was considered to be not spending enough on safety, so it was required to spend money on marginal safety measures until it cost the same as other forms of energy).
In all honesty, I think that would lead to some form of nationalization of Gmail to force it to continue as a service. Approximately half of Americans use Gmail and that is "too big to fail".
When I was a teenager I thought kids were a pyramid scheme. If your life isn't worthwhile, then what point is there in creating another life whose worth will be equally questionable? This sounds like your "scapegoat for meaning of life" idea.
What I eventually gradually realized was that the kid might just be another person, but you're not just creating a person, you're also creating a relationship with that person. And it's a unique kind of relationship, in some ways more intimate than any relationship you can have with anyone else including your romantic partner. (Which adult runs with beaming face to hug you whenever they see you come home from work and you know it's all totally genuine?) I'm not an expert on what has objective meaning in life, but I'm pretty sure that deep relationships like this are one of the stronger candidates.
Even more ironically, environmemtal groups and green parties have essentially created the problem of climate change. If the whole world had switched to nuclear power starting in the 1970s, a large fraction of carbon emissions so far and a larger fraction of future emissions would never have happened.
The nice thing about math is that often it's much harder to find a proof than to verify that proof. So math AI is allowed to make lots of dumb mistakes, we just want it to make the occasional real finding too.
Isn't the determining factor not which companies your employer competes against, but where the jobs are located? For example Google pays "tier 3" compensation packages to its Bay Area employees, but compensation for a Google employee in Bangalore would be much lower.
I'm guessing - instead of memorizing "7*9=63" (and numerous other products), you memorize that the multiples of 9 are "9,18,27,36,45,54,63..." and the 7th one in that list is the one you want?
I would say that WebMD is better than Wikipedia. Anyone can edit Wikipedia, and in practice this means content often comes from idiosyncratic people with axes to grind. Wikipedia pages vary immensely in correctness, completeness, objectivity, clarity, and usefulness. WebMD, in contrast, is pretty consistent in all those ways; its flaws (wordiness, lack of reference to detailed research, catering to the customer) are of minor consequence to the typical person searching for medical information (we at HN are not the typical person). The best Wikipedia articles are better than the best WebMD ones, but the worst Wikipedia articles are worse, and in medicine it's the floor you care more about.