That’s not really super meaningful in terms of interplanetary travel. For example, for most of the year Mercury is the closest planet to Earth. Change in orbital velocity matters more than distance
It's pretty dense because of all the subordinate clauses.
"... cases that asked the court to revisit the existing doctrine. This doctrine protected police from lawsuits concerning police conduct, where their conduct didn't involve an obvious crime."
It's not really inferiority: the commonality of the other countries is that they typically follow a different regime of negotiation of the road. In specific, the USA and other anglophone countries are extremely strict about what motions are allowed on the road: the expectation is that everyone stays precisely within the lanes and drives a bit robotically.
This, however, is actually not that common in most of the world, where the road is much more 'negotiated': speeds are slower but the streets more chaotic. I wonder sometimes if it's more like treating the vehicles as horses rather than boxes of death, or something similar: it's a markedly different mode.
I imagine his point is that self-driving cars rely on the robotic driving customs of parts of the West to do as well as they do, and that he's skeptical of these vehicles' ability to interact with more dynamic streetscapes filled with e-scooters, rickshaws, tuk-tuks, people carrying stuff, and so on.
Can corroborate, also in Shanghai: I had much preferred Ofo to the Mobikes because they were a 'normal bike' without a belt chain. But then... time passed and rain poured, rusting up the chains and riders bending the wheels in innovative ways. Sometimes I'll luck out on a fresh Ofo bike, and then it's fine, but for every one of those there are 8 bikes I have to ditch because the chain won't go back on or the wheel isn't even planar.
It can be both. The article says there's the idea of sussing out that the different businessmen are "the same kind of person" with similar 'desires'. That's why the article mentions cases of men trying to signal wanting to have wanton sex, but actually going to lengths to not engage in it.
A total extinction event is pretty unlikely: a nuclear war could perhaps end our civilization, but there'd still be folks around, even if their lives were harder. It's believed that we've already as a species gone through a very small population bottleneck, and homo sapiens can probably survive a nuclear war of even the worst kind.
That said, a thousand years is a long time to research a Death Star I suppose.
Could be: a lot of the 'branding' of the actor these days is about curating what films they show up in. Like, if Johnny Depp is in a movie, you know generally what kind of film it'll be. The AA (Artificial Actor, haha) would benefit from having an agent, much like real actors, to keep consumers' meta-dissonance down.
That said, actors swap between wildly disparate roles all the time and no one seems to care!