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So go with the four-years-ago version.

Wouldn't it be nice if someone could set up a "next Silicon Valley" somewhere that doesn't already have an outrageous cost of living?

Whatever happened to National Brotherhood Week as an institution?

It seems like the sort of thing which the US could do with more of, given how much race relations have deteriorated since the 60s.

Why, when romanising their alphabet, did the Vietnamese do it in a way that didn't line up with any European language?

Strikes me as a combination of (a) gimmick, and (b) solution in search of a problem. How far are you really going to get through the car-buying process without being able to see a physical vehicle?

This technology may have its uses, but selling cars isn't one of them.

To the extent that chess players can really be considered geniuses, it seems like a horrendous waste of genius.

I take this as evidence that the word "racism" has completely lost whatever meaning it may have had, and that we should probably make up a new word to mean what "racism" used to mean, if we still think that's a useful concept.

Firstly the Eskimos probably didnt have quite such fancy kayaks eighteen thousand years ago.

Secondly though, if you're struggling to survive in a vast empty landscape already you don't have a lot of time or motivation for ten thousand mile voyages of exploration.

Travel a hundred miles and you're really tired and you're in a different part of Alaska where you don't know where the good food and water sources are.

Keep travelling yet further and eventually you reach a place where you don't even know what food sources look like.

An hour ago I'd never heard of bumble. Now I've heard of it through two unrelated articles found on two different social news sites.

Bumble's PR people deserve a pat on the back (and the profession of modern journalism deserves a kick in the head).

A more significant point is that the 747 carries only fuel, the rocket carries fuel and oxidiser, which substantially increases the variety of ways in which things can go interestingly wrong.

>I'm not trying to pose a rhetorical question. I think this is literally a choice that societies have to make.

It would be nice if we could actually make that choice. Better still, it would be nice if we had a whole lot of societies which made different choices and people were free to move between them, so we could individually make a choice.

Instead though we've got a lowest-common-denominator society.

Kids don't care, as long as they have a yard to play in and some other kids to play with.

I have a proposition. How about anyone who wants to live in a society with a UBI can organise one privately between themselves, and the rest of us can avoid it?

Start an organisation which takes from each member according to his means and shares it out equally, and see who wants to join. I wish you well.

In practice yes, but not in moral terms.

Why is your solution more government involvement? Why not less?

If there's so much money to be made in child are, why aren't childcare centres popping up on every street corner? It's the kind of business you can easily run from your house. Get five neighbours to pay you twenty bucks a day to look after their kid, and everybody is coming out ahead.

I can only assume that the reason it doesn't happen is massive government licensing requirements.

Just as long as I'm still allowed to own a car, much as I'm still allowed to own a horse, I'm okay with this.

"Progressive" is such a stupid word. Who gets to decide what is, and isn't, progress?

The only people who seem to be making money off twitter are journalists, who can now dash off a 1000-word "Thing trends on twitter" article in seven minutes without having to leave the office.

I dunno, there's a lot of cheap 1880s "workers cottages" around here which have nonetheless been built with a lot more style and care than the average new building.

And I think it's a shame that anyone thinks they deserve "recognition" based on who their ancestors were.

I guess I'd prefer it to a situation where anyone at all could make a clone of me on their 3D printer slash uterus.

There are an awful lot of ethical and legal considerations when custom-designed intelligent organisms become possible, I'm not sure if IP is high on the list.

Not at all, you need money and a good sob story. Nobody cares about the sob story of the rich hedge fund which isn't making as much money as it could be, they want sob stories with blue-collar workers sitting at a kitchen table looking balefully into the camera.

Go electric. Hydrogen is a zombie technology.

Twenty or ten years ago hydrogen seemed like a pretty good way to go, and these products are the end result of projects started way back then. But batteries have pretty much leapfrogged hydrogen in every way, and I can't see hydrogen staging a comeback.

But the relevant comparison is to batteries, which are more efficient.

The fact that you don't hear about it is largely because employees tend to be better at whining to the media when they don't get their way than shareholders.

The American landscape is littered with many large companies which have gone bankrupt by giving in to all their employees' demands at the cost of profitability. The big airlines, for instance. And the carmakers.

And I'm sure we can keep that formula updated.

Just let it drift, yes, I assume.

Then maybe in a few thousand years when we're a full hour out we can think about having a leap hour.

Abolishing leap years, on the other hand, would cause the calendar to shift relative to the seasons by a notable amount during your lifetime.

Dealing with twenty people doesn't sound like solitude.

Plenty of places in the world you can get in a car, drive out somewhere, and be completely alone.

You'd think that if anywhere on Earth stands to benefit from global warming it's Canada.

That's a fairly Manhattanite-level concept of personal space.