taygetea

Glancing at the big, high-dpi navigation map and getting the info you need quickly is a pretty major feature. The Model 3 screen has a bit of this issue with buttons around the edges, but where it's important, like speed, autopilot controls, and the map, they've done well.

I keep seeing people in these comments saying that the Taycan is better than the Model S, but I'm not sure what they're seeing. It has a razor-thin acceleration advantage and can manage that more than once on a charge, but it does that at the cost of being a very expensive and cramped sports car design. If you're optimizing for track performance, sure, but that's not a very common use case, as opposed to the usefulness of a longer range, more spacious, cheaper sedan.

For [3], Guesstimate ( https://www.getguesstimate.com ) pretty much does that.

Those acronyms mean different things in the US. USPS = United States Postal Service, the official one. UPS = United Parcel Service, a different company

The terms we know in the Drake equation make it very difficult to say it is unlikely for intelligence to arise more than once. ~100 billion stars * ~100 billion galaxies in the observable universe. Exoplanet surveys seem to be suggesting at least one planet per star on average. In addition, chemical self replication seems to happen fairly easily given the right chemical conditions, which don't appear to require much more than liquid water.

The comment you were responding to wasn't referring to the 1970s, it was referring to the repeated cries of Malthusian catastrophes dating back to Malthus himself. The unexpected technology mentioned was a 50-fold increase in agricultural productivity per person working in agriculture. Several times in the last several hundred years, similar patterns were pointed out. All of them were solved with technology they had no way of knowing about.