exasperation

In theory some configurations have stronger or weaker first mover advantage. This is known as white privilege.

It wouldn't be a 30% higher electrical bill overall. It would be 30% more for whatever power you're using for this specific device, which, if it's ordinarily 10W while in sleep and an average 100W while in use, and you use it 50 hours per week, or 215 hours per month, that's a baseline power usage of 21500 watt hours in use and 5050 watt hours from idle/sleep/suspend. Or a total of 26550 watt hours, or 26.5 kWh. At 20 cents per kWh, you're talking about $5.30 per month in electricity for the computer. A 30% increase would be an extra $1.60 per month.

That wasn't the real Tesla, though. It was actually the Goblin King.

Many kid movies raise some troubling implications about personhood and moral agency with anthropomorphized non-human characters (Toy Story and life/death/abandonment, what do obligate carnivores in Zootopia eat, etc.).

But Bee Movie inexplicably just dives right into it instead of leaving it unexplored on the edges. If the bees are fully intelligent beings with rich inner experiences, what moral obligation do we owe them? It's a mess of a concept.

All this is just saying that you personally put more weight on the things that are better about later adulthood than early adulthood or adolescence. And that can be your choice, but it doesn't have to be everyone's choice.

You acknowledge that the health and friendships piece gets harder with age but push back against the idea that it inevitably gets worse. But averaged among all people, things will tend to get worse, and some people who actually experience that deterioration will conclude (as is their right) that things were better when health and friendships were easier.

But we also make new relationships as we get older. Is life better when you have a grandparent? Or when you have a grandchild?

These aren't symmetrical. When you are a young person who loves your grandparents, you haven't actually mourned a loss of a grandchild you personally knew. On the flip side, when you have a grandchild you might also view that relationship through the lens of a lost relationship with a deceased grandparent. In other words, only one of those experiences is 100% good, rather than a bittersweet mix of good and sad.

Not to mention, plenty of people will never have grandchildren. To them, the mourned loss of a grandparent is the end of that road. There's no replacement on its way.

Put it this way: if given the opportunity to wake up 10 years in the past, in your body of 10 years ago, how positive or negative would you view that? Plenty of people would vote on different sides of that, and that's OK to have different views based on one's own experiences.

Depends on sunlight, and the color of the pavement. For dark asphalt, simply preventing a dusting of white snow goes a long way at converting the sunlight into heat, basically for free.

That albedo effect is a big part of the reason why it's so important to try to save as much snow/glacier/icecap now as possible at the poles. It's a cascading effect where a little bit of melting early on ends up making a huge difference in how much melting happens overall.

I interpret it to be more about the weight given to different pros and cons about different stages in life.

Some people really, really prize autonomy, and don't get to experience that until pretty late in life. For these people, the stifling limits of adolescence, without their own money or independence from parents, can be miserable.

Some people really, really prize being free of responsibilities. To this group, sometimes adulthood comes with too many challenges and responsibilities that they find independence to be stifling.

Some care about physical health, which may correlate with younger ages.

Some love the ease of friendships in adolescence and early adulthood, and long for that dynamic when they realize that making new friends or maintaining existing friendships gets harder after 30, and even more so after 40.

Some feel very strongly about the loved ones they've lost since their childhood, and wish they could've appreciated those shared experiences more in the moment.

And we all have different experiences. I have no idea if my best years are ahead of me or behind me, but I could see an argument in either direction.

This all or nothing thinking often just turns into an excuse for doing nothing.

I can make a better world by making things better in my immediate vicinity, without dying for it. I can help one person at a time, and it might not scale to some kind of globally noticeable improvement, but it can still a difference to each of those people, and was worth whatever effort or sacrifice involved.

The arm is lit up from the bottom, totally doesn't fit the rest of the lighting in the picture.

This is such a snore-gasm.

What's funny is I just typed a comment trying to analyze what types of jobs would allow for this, and one category was the "discrete projects that have a defined beginning and end" type jobs, and it did cross my mind that movie-style heists tend to have this kind of arrangement.