Also ozone machines, when used properly and safely (no occupants), can sometimes help to speed up the offgassing process. If you're interested in doing this, please read up on it so you don't do it wrong or dangerously. It can also in some cases cause new, worse VOC's to form, so...user beware.

He keeps talking about wanting to do something "important." But I think he is conflating the "prestigious / expected" meaning of important with another interpretation: "meaningful."

Plenty of next steps for a founder are prestigious. But few are meaningful. Most new companies make money by finding efficiencies and disintermediating people from processes in various ways. This usually means pushing an entire sector (like travel agents) out of gainful employment. For whatever reason, Silicon Valley startups rarely punch up - they don't find efficiencies in health insurance or healthcare billing, they don't do "Moneyball" for CEO's and figure out how to run a company for less, they don't find efficiencies that cause us to pay less money to the rich (except Cost Plus Drugs).

No, they punch down, and make increasing numbers of the middle class into the new precariat. For that, the founders are praised and told that they are important. But the work, being morally questionable, is not meaningful.

  By contrast, many meaningful endeavors are about charity - giving access, opportunity, dignity, and money to those on the bottom rungs of society. 

  The emptiness he feels is a lack of meaning, but he's trying to fill it with more prestige, and that's why it's not working.

Why are they more expensive? I hoped they would be cheaper without a driver to compensate.

Likely because they're not pricing based on their costs, but rather what the market will bear.

Although they have a lot of R&D to recoup, so that's a cost.

...but I dropped out of Harvard, in part because of health problems that were delayed consequences of extreme neglect and an unhealthy home life.

My take on things is this. When you are the "exception," people talk a lot about how you should Just Get a Good Education, and then you can escape all this. You may get a scholarship to a good school, but that's it. Abuse in the home? That's your problem to deal with. Parents poor and overwhelmed? Screw those parents, we're abandoning those parents, we only care about their kids, and only if they're such prodigies that they can succeed in spite of the other numerous obstacles.

Here's the thing. I've known several prodigies from challenging backgrounds who got into great schools. Many of them had a lot of problems because of physical and mental health issues caused by their upbringing and environments. Some of these problems interrupted or curtailed their educations.

By contrast, I've also known people who had safe, stable homes, and long-term affordable housing. These folks were always able to further their education. But smart, educated folks with chaotic and abusive home lives were not always able to make it to happiness and stability.

Saying education will fix all woes is a cop-out. It's a way of uplifting a few show ponies and leaving everyone else in misery. Speaking as a former show pony. If you replace "two parent household" with "safe, stable, healthy home" I agree with what he's saying. I would also add healthcare. My knowledge of calculus did not help me as a young person when I was injured and had no money for physical therapy. Only socialized medicine would have helped me. Education is great, but it's not a substitute for a functioning society with a safety net.

this is a key point. in fact my own experience was that i didn't get a safe and stable home until my parents divorced, so it is not automatic that a two parent household would be better, but we grew up in a country where the social security provided adequate support for us to get that stable home.

myself living in a country now without that support, i would not be able to provide a stable home without a partner. if i were to loose my partner i would have to leave this place (but at least i would have the option to do that).

the locals here don't have that option. and since social security in the USA is lacking, the focus on a two parent families is easy to understand, because it is more likely to lead to more stability. but in the end, stability is what matters, not the number of parents,

Long before actual submersion, the effects of rising seas will affect property in the forms of more frequent storms, flooding, and the effects on groundwater like in the Florida condo collapse. Inland, many parts of the world will start having water scarcity, or fire risk.

Instead of an all-over rising real estate market, I think prices in places like Florida, parts of Texas, Louisiana, etc. will crater due to uninsurability. The places that are still standing undamaged in 15 years' time will be incredibly expensive.

The only tricky part is knowing where those places will be exactly. The areas that were "sure things" just a few years ago, such as the Pacific Northwest and Vermont, have been shown to be not nearly so certain. Lytton, Canada spontaneously combusted, while VT has had many damaging storms and floods. So it's a guessing game at this point.

One could make the argument that renting is the best gambit, because that's the only way you won't get stuck with a climate change "lemon."

All in all, I have frequently had to reschedule or erase something I thought was "set in stone" for a variety of reasons. I've never regretted writing something in erasable ink whereas the same cannot be said for permanent ink.

TL;DR - the more dynamic, the better.

Secondly, if I have to make a change, my biggest problem is not changing the one item, but changing the downstream issues, such as dependencies, or energy levels. If I'm cancelling task A then I'm also having to figure out how to get dependency B and C done another way. If I'm moving appointment Y to another day, do I have the energy to do appointment Y along with what I already had scheduled for that day?

Dependencies and working with your "energy budget" might be two places for AI to help with a digital planner.

In contrast this test does not distinguish between virus and vaccine as the cause: <https://onlinedoctor.superdrug.com/coronavirus-antibody-test...>.

I don't have a better approach than checking the descriptions of individual antibody tests. But I know the distinction is real, because IIRC the ONS (statistics body) used tests which distinguished, when they ran their ongoing study.