I didn't even get to build costs. In my foolish youth, I worked off shore oil rigs doing wireline. Shoving a nuclear reactor down a 3.5"-5" pipe 8,000 to 22,500 feet deep will prove to be an interesting engineering challenge, not to mention "Dancin' with Kelly". (The main rotating drilling platform that makes the pipe rotate and the drill head bite.) The technology to drift a hole more than a 20 meters in diameter vertically down half a mile or more is not anything I've read about. Is it even possible?

I think they're a bit more than that, but assume you're right... have you considered that they're less than three years old? ChatGPT launched November 30, 2022. And the reasoning models that have made them massively more effective in many areas (especially software development) are barely a year old?

If you reason about what will happen in the next decade or two based on where the technology is right now, a technology that didn't even exist five years ago and is still obviously in its infancy, you're clearly missing the most important point, which is that the pace of improvement has been and continues to be incredibly rapid. You need to base your reasoning on what the models will be capable of five years from now, ten years from now. Unless we suddenly hit a wall, they'll be vastly better. How much better? No one knows, but it seems safe to expect that they'll be orders of magnitude better.

I'd say they still haven't fixed their mistake, which was to create a shitty web site. A good web catalog will be far superior to any paper catalog, providing multiple ways to find a part, having real-time information about where the part is located among the retail stores, warehouses and suppliers, providing links to datasheets, installation guides, and lots more.

If Jaycar gets a competitor that builds a good web site, they'll go out of business. The fact that they don't have much competition has saved them so far, but they've responded by going the wrong direction.

No, they can't. They're already seeing searches decline as people move to asking LLMs instead. The LLMs actually end up using Google, but that doesn't generate any ad revenue for Google (that's something Google may have to figure out how to put a stop to). The solution so far is the addition of "AI results" to search output... but those AI results are produced by a far inferior model because Google search gets hundreds of thousands of queries per second, and it's currently infeasible to service those queries with a full-powered model. But the output of the inferior model doesn't satisfy users, so many of them are shifting to ChatGPT or Claude (I am!). If users opt for paid subscriptions to LLMs instead of free, ad-supported search, fine, but Google needs to be in that game and to get them to use Gemini rather than the competitors. For users who won't pay for a subscription, I assume that ad-supported LLM usage will become a thing, and Google clearly wants to get there first, or at least early enough. But right now they don't actually have the capacity and LLM usage is too expensive for an ad-supported model.

So... they need 1000X capacity, and they need it at something not too far above current OPEX costs. If it requires massive CAPEX, that's less problematic as long as it can be funded from revenues (including future revenues), and in fact it's actually good for Google if massive CAPEX is required, because it helps to build their moat, protecting them from competition by other companies that don't have the same resources. But OPEX can't be 1000X, it probably can't even be 10X.

What you describe is the only solution, but it almost certainly can't happen fast enough to prevent massive climate-caused death tolls, including lots of wars produced by the need to relocate billions of people and restructure global agriculture. The enormous refugee crises and wars are, of course, going to disrupt the technology transition that your solution necessarily and correctly relies on, which will slow it down, resulting in even more emissions and more warming.

I think we very well might have to employ geoengineering to mitigate the temperature increase and keep the equatorial areas livable while we decarbonize. Maybe not. I hope not. But we should absolutely be investing in geoengineering research now so that we have the capability if we need it. I understand the concern many people have that if we know how to mitigate warming without reducing CO2, we may choose to do that as the easier course. But I think we're going to find the inevitable and unavoidable (barring geoengineering to reduce insolation) CO2-driven temperature increases to be simply unmanageable.

The only other option is to somehow create a world government capable of:

1. Forcing implementation of decarbonization much faster than is economically-preferable,
2 Funding carbon sequestration at incredible rates, probably consuming a significant portion of global GDP
3. Forcing temperate regions to peacefully accept massive influxes of refugees from equatorial regions, and
4. Coordinating global production and distribution of food, accommodating for changing productivity of farmland.

Oh, and we'd better create this powerful, far-sighted and non-corrupt world government within the next decade or so. If we can't do that, self-interested squabbling between countries is going to prevent rapid implementation of the solution even in the absence of the refugee crisis and resulting wars.

Or, we can use geoengineering to slow the temperature rise down and gain some time and breathing room to implement decarbonization and then sequestration.

Global birth rates are already crashing. Most of the developed world is already well below replacement and is increasingly dependent on immigration. On current trends the global population is already slated to start declining within 15-20 years. The decline is likely to cause serious problems within 50 years, and if at some point we don't reverse or slow the decline, within 100 years we may struggle to maintain our knowledge base (ignoring AI, which probably shouldn't be ignored).

The clarity and thoroughness of your reasoning and explanation are impressive.

The AI business is also the search business.

The capacity of the government of a large jurisdiction like California, or more particularly the US, could bankrupt someone like Musk, so I say, bring it on. Within a decade Musk would have abandoned all efforts, or, even better, be stone cold broke (frankly billionaires shouldn't exist at all, and we should tax the living fuck out of them down to their last $200 million).

We're too afraid of these modern day Bond villains when we should be aiming every financial, and probably every real, cannon straight at them and putting them in a sense of mortal danger every minute of their waking lives, so that they literally piss themselves in terror at the though that "we the people" might decide to wipe them out for good.

That's just what human beings do. It's not really even that's going over budget it's that whenever these things are pitched they are under budgeted.

If we got upset every time anything went over budget we wouldn't have a country. We never would have made it out of the Northeast.

You need to build in extra lines and stops because there's a lot of in California people want to go. We aren't at the point yet where we are going to be building expressways. That kind of infrastructure comes later after you have a larger amount of rail installed. It isn't anything we can't or wouldn't do though in the absence of large car companies and airlines screwing everything up for the sake of their own profit.

There is absolutely nothing stupider than having an entire transportation system built around 3,000 lb+ personal vehicles that we all have to be personally responsible for both on and off the road. How many extra hours do we work to pay for these damn things? And if you're okay with that fine but fuck you for dragging me into it so that I have to pay for it too. I'm fucking sick and tired of paying for gearhead's fucking hobby.

Hmm... Does that sound like a feature I would want to help pay for? The answer may surprise me. I think it sounds like a "Maybe" or even a "Yes" if the description was fleshed out a little bit. However I can also see where it belongs in an optional category for people who want it... Seems to me like the real cost would be quite large, but for an "ancient" and kind of fundamental reason: The HTTP links only go one way. That means there's no easy way for Scrapbook to know the target webpage has changed...

So ancient that my memory is fuzzy, but I'm pretty sure the original design of the WWW was supposed to involve bidirectional links. At least as an option.

But mostly Firefox updates these years just seem to be annoying stuff that I would not offer money for. It feels like there is a constant stream of annoying pitches for new features I don't want or need and almost nothing that actually improves my "browser experience". When did they add that "Open All in Tabs" thing? Must have been years ago. I use that feature about once a day to avoid the <Ctrl> key. But I wouldn't have chipped in ten bucks for it...

I think (hope?) the age of Donaldian Decadence will end soon. The YOB seems more likely to implode each day...

But not the joke I was hoping for. These days most of the crossovers or callbacks seem to depend on looping AI into the joke.

It had nothing to do with renewables they had a voltage surge and the hadn't prepared for it. They could have been running their entire grade off nuclear and they still would have had the outage.

It's a classic case of not spending the money to keep infrastructure of to date in order to prevent disasters. The basic problem is that nobody ever gets a pat on the back for stopping a disaster they get it for the cleanup afterwards...

Put another way nobody likes spending money on preventative maintenance.

Rather shallow FP, but Subject is the joke I was looking for.

However the biggest jokes these days are explanations of why stock prices do anything at all. It's become a fantasy game. My newest joke along these lines:

Too many incommensurables.

Again though you have to compare it to alternatives. And the fact is wind and solar installations with batteries to make up for the gaps are infinitely cheaper than even well understood nuclear plant designs.