One way or another new cars are going to be made. It’s definitely better for the environment if these new cars are electric than if they are internal combustion.

Ideally we would transition to more public infrastructure for transit (trains and busses), but some cars will always be needed and it’s better for the environment if those cars run on electricity.

You shouldn’t feel bad about that… the space directly under a lifeguard stand is usually considered to be a “blind spot” for the lifeguard stationed there. Lifeguards working in teams are supposed to be trained to scan their areas as well as the spaces directly below their fellow lifeguards.

It’s one of those things that seem silly in theory, but in practice can be absolutely vital (as it seems you found out!).

Total hard drive cost is likely around a million bucks. If the specialized compression format can save half of that it’s no small chunk of change, but I can also imagine that high development costs could make even significant storage savings not worth the hassle of doing something custom and worrying about potential bugs.

Back of the napkin math says it would only take 5 to 10 racks of something like this to cover the storage requirements. Not something that comes cheap, but certainly doable and still below the industrial scale of massive data centers run by most big tech companies.

The sensors are pretty damn good for what they are… the problem is to get better quality pictures you need bigger sensors, and to get light to focus on bigger sensors you need thicker and larger lenses, and so far no one is interested in making a phone with a giant 1” thick lens sticking off the back.

This isn’t really related to the main conversation, but shoving water through a pipe at ridiculously high speeds and pressures actually has several interesting problems which essentially limit the maximum amount of water that can go through a pipe per second. https://what-if.xkcd.com/147/