I see the point now, it "took" (pretty much past tense) about 30 years.

I do remember when it came out, and when a work friend got one in the early 2000s. It seemed so freaky. Everybody was like, 'Toyota loses money on every one!' 'You're going to be crying when the battery wears out!' 'It'll break down twice as much as a normal car because it has 2 drivetrains!'

one of Toyota's executives said that every model would be offered as a hybrid in about a decade. That might happen after three decades.

Really? The only ones available without a hybrid option that I can see are the GR 86 rwd coupe and the GR Supra.

We could include the GR Corolla and Hatchback Corolla if you don't consider them "Corollas."

But I was told the opposite:

"We were ahead of them by a mile, by 10 miles, on the internal combustion engine. They went into EVs, and then they convinced the Western world to go into EVs and play their game," the freshman Republican lawmaker from Ohio said during an auto industry conference. "That was just irrational, dumb policy."...

"I pushed back on the premise that EV somehow is about innovation," he said. "Electric vehicles were around in 1910. It's not like this is new technology."

Here's a guy working hard to ensure the US not only loses the global competition for auto production, but becomes the last bastion of tailpipe emissions.

Maybe I'm just a weirdo but I am very annoyed at them for trying to take away the option of local-only accounts. Why do I need to let them be a third party to everything I do starting with logging in? Nobody asked for this.

Or even just good old fashioned human-driven competition. A 60x price increase will draw new competitors. I'm not saying this is easy and I could do it in a weekend or a year, but still, this is not rocket science.

OpenAI got out ahead but really, how do you beat google at this?

Technology-wise, they've had top researchers all along. Want more? Just hire them, not hard when you have infinite money.

And google has access to everything. They serve about 1/3 of the population on earth every day. Not just search but webmail, texts, maps, word processor, TV (youtube), transportation (Waymo) everything.

Google is on almost everybody else's webpages too, through Google Ads.

There isn't much about your digital life google doesn't know about, and almost every potentially productive use of AI can be deployed to billions through their own services.

Right, what the free market wants to do is levelize our standard of living with our low-cost competitors, or import all the chips from them (with the security and supply risks that entails).

Simply shaming Intel for seeking government handouts does not solve our problem - how to maintain a domestic industry including internal competition rather than government choosing the winners and subsidizing incompetence.

From here in my comfortable chair it's hard to judge how bad the situation is, vs. to what extent it might be a form of protest by somebody who just doesn't like self-driving cars. There has been vandalism and harassment of a few types, from setting them on fire to calling dozens of them to the same place at the same time to cause gridlock. In San Francisco there was a huge flap because a waymo ran over a cat.

OK, it could be argued the government is the problem in the first place, since laws are a big part of why production here is economically nonviable. The problem is how specifically to solve that? Each law is there for a reason. It's easy to dismiss regulation broadly but harder in each given case.

If the US as a whole were a good place for this, a happy market solution would be for Intel to be eaten alive by another American competitor until either regains its competency or goes away. But surely you can see the national security risks of the more likely outcome - our supply depending on potential adversaries, including all the chips in critical infrastructure and defense hardware.

That is the basic problem, they don't. Mass-producing semiconductors in the USA without subsidies is not economically viable. The CHIPS act (or equivalently, tariffs) is an effort to tip the financial scales in favor of maintaining domestic production, for national security (so we can't be "cut off" by other nations). But such a scheme will not work if it is not executed in a financially predictable manner.

The question is whether the ads will be separate, like banner ads (albeit probably informed by your discussions) or woven into the responses themselves, whcih would be bad bad bad.

That's just using AI as a better search engine. Nobody is feeling compelled to go with its suggestions.

Just tell me if you're seriously worried that using AI constitutes enslavement.

Oh wow, sign me up for your newsletter on the emancipation of washing machines.

The opposing force is they are looking down the barrel of a demographic implosion that has already begun. Their labor force started shrinking in 2015.