Decay is always lumpy. In general you are correct, but this topic isn’t the general state of Russia, but the state of their nuclear program. By all reports that program has done much better than the typical program.

People in the west who have access to classified information are acting like the think Russia’s nukes work. We also know that at the fall of the soviet union the people who lead the nuke programs got more power. As such I think Russia has working nukes - if there is any decay in the program it would have started at most 2 years ago - not long enough for there to be many failures.

That is different from sabre rattling - they get plenty of propaganda value from a threat that they are unlikely to use. They are well aware that launching a nuke means they and all their loved ones die (it is unlikely more than a few thousand humans would survive the result), so they are unlikely to use their nukes, but reminding everyone they have them is helpful. And they have a few deranged people (likely everyone) that we can’t assume they won’t.

Maybe a decoy account. We know the CIA is only obvious when they want you to look away from something else

I’m blind without my glasses. I’ve thought about surgery but I’m wear ansi safety glasses anyway - I know what it is like to go to the bathroom without my glasses - that is okay in the middle of the night - but I have no interest in my whole life being like that so I’m protecting my eyes as best I can.

You forgot inflation. If you are happy with 40k today that could be 80k by the time you retire and likely will be over 150k by the time you die.

You are not wrong - but the point is there is value here, are just not getting it to the right people.

All spying needs to be owned by the person who owns the car. GM or however might have data, but it needs to not be accessible by them except by my agreement. Do I want my dealer to know when I need an oil change - maybe (depends on if I trust my dealer), or maybe I want my independent mechanic to know this, or maybe I change my own oil and want only me to know.

There are useful things about internet connections and phone home. Maybe not for you, but for many.

For company vehicles when the car is due for an oil change the mechanics should be informed not the driver. Likewise the company should be able to track where their cars are and when they are driving (and restrict them from driving outside of their territory). For things like snow plows the company needs to track where they have plowed already.

When it is cold it is nice to tell the car to start warming up 5 minutes before you get into it. For electric cars that are currently plugged in this is important as it lets you spend grid energy to warm up the car instead of range.

It is also useful to have up to date maps on the car - there are things a built in system can do that android auto / apple carplay cannot do. Though you have to drive a lot for this to be worth it. (My car as GM’s onstar and no android auto - I don’t pay for it, but I could see in a 10 minute test drive how onstar is better if you are driving the car for hours every day - since I mostly work from home or bike it isn’t worth it, but I can see how it is better despite not being better)

But there needs to be a non-charge option for things like remote start.

Somewhat, but it also scares me.

I know that I’m very introverted. I like to go “heads down” writing code all day. However I’m also painfully aware from experience that not talking to others means I’m out of the loop and soon I’m developing great code for something the company doesn’t need. I need to spend time in the office listening to others talk - I get much less done, but at least what I get done are things the company cares about, and in turn I’m much more likely to keep my job (having to find a new job is one of the worst things that can happen to an introvert - I have to convince strangers to hire me)

Right now I go to the office about 16 hours a week, which seems to be enough. I also live close enough to work that I can ride my bike - in turn commute time is also exercise time, something I need to get more of anyway.

Onless you will die in a few years growth should be where most of your retire early money comes from. As you get older you need less growth though.

That depends - 3% is a safe withdrawal rate gowing your income with inflation and not running out. However you won’t live forever and so can touch some principal and so can go higher - how much is the question.

Maybe you can’t but there are people with natural oil springs on their land who could. I don’t know any who do and the amount coming from the springs isn’t much, but they could.

ethanol fuel is done by a few people at home, it isn’t hard, just takes a lot of labor.

Very true. Right now most cars are still petro and so stations are everywhere. The average car is about 12 years old and most poor people will choose to scrap them at around 25, so there are plenty of stations to meet the demand. However in a few years that average will not include enough petro to support as many stations - how will they respond is a question.

in 20 years petro will be a special order thing outside of a few niches. At least by current trends - perhaps some alternative will come and change everything, who knows.

One maybe not. However there are not a lot of airplanes (or pilots) and so it doesn’t take too many crashes before people start noticing they can’t get airplanes to someplace at all, or if they can they have to book early because they are all full (and soon after they notice seats they have booked get canceled - they won’t know it is because the plane crashed, but they know they can’t get there)

How long before you can’t afford to maintain the diesel? I drove a diesel until rust caused the fuel tank to drop - I could still fix it but that is more than I have time to do myself and the cost is half way to a new car (i bought a 3 year old ev to get something nicer), with there lively being a similar amount of maintenance next year. I miss the ability to haul a 10000lbs but since nobody makes basic trucks anything I can afford was not much better (and thus only a few years from the same rust issues)

even if nobody bought a new car this year, used cars are all getting older and so it won’t be long before someone has to buy new just to get anything

We can’t even make radio waves that travel that far. Our best radio telescopes focused on something near that we suspect might have life don’t have enough power for us to think they can be received by an arbitrarily advanced civilization on the other end (assuming there is that happens to be listening when the signals arrive). And that is stars in our own subarm of the milky way.

Space is just bigger than you can imagine.

Sort of - but there is no reason to think we will ever be able to make something that won’t break. Even intersellar is questionable just because the odds of the ship breaking in the time needed are too high.

you can’t fathom it because you were raised that way. Different parents / society and you would call those normal and partake.

there have been too many through history to think it is anything else.

Fad. Someone started doing it, and it caught on so no everyone does. The iPod started the iEverything phase. A local car dealer near me uses NameTube.com because they decided they needed a website about the time youtube got a lot press. There are many more things over the years that became a fad for a while, and there will be more.

ML is run by people who are not only communist, but also communists can do no wrong, capitalists can do no right. Just being communist most of us could live with, but the second is a problem. When someone cannot agree things like genocides that various communist governments are a bad it is really hard to have productive conversations.