They're passenger (and freight) trains. The rails were built for travel, not for scenic display.
OTOH, the sure aren't high speed rail. Most of the lines were build over 50 years ago.

OTOH, the BART example was for a "high speed train", though I believe the speed is limited underground. But the rise is from perhaps two or three stories below ground to about 1 story above ground. That said, I believe that the rise is about 2-3 miles long, so it's not steep.

N.B.: I good system of automated taxis could do the job...but note "good system". Most places I've ever lived the taxis were both too expensive and to difficult to use to do the job.

A HSR network is really problematic without a really good local transit network. (One you can reasonably carry your baggage on.)

Sometimes using the highway ROW works, other times it doesn't. This partially depends on the design of the highways, and partially depends one whether they have the same destination. A train station under a section of elevated roadway can work well...but if you don't have that convenient elevated roadway things can get more difficult.

I can't even estimate costs, but they can get pretty high. (And sometimes it's easy.)

Since there are trains that go over the rocky mountains, I think that argument fails. (But it might succeed if you argue practicality rather than possibility.)

FWIW, The SFBay Area BART system has high speed trains that move from elevated to underground. It's not a steep grade, of course, but it's done. (IIRC "high speed" for the BART system is around 70 mph, and is only obtained on the long straight sections. Of course, my knowledge is multiple decades old.)

There are also real problems with sparsely available origin and destination points. And the cost of building the lines through developed areas.

If you build a good system, it will be more efficient for the areas that it serves. But rail transit has fixed routes. This makes it inflexible. And you really need to multi-track the rails, because breakdowns will occasionally happen.

FWIW, I feel that streetcars are much more plausible/effective/significant per unit cost than are high speed rails. High speed rail is useful AFTER you solve the local distribution problems.

Most geothermal heat plants aren't long term without repair for various different reasons. IIRC, internal fouling is one of the main reasons. This sounds like it might be a different approach, though of course you need a volcano to make it work.

Well, when you extract the heat from the rock it becomes less fluid.

Exactly this, the "spec" is almost always a very rough draft that is largely written and consumed by people that want to feel like they contribute to the project even though they don't understand the customer or the developer situation that well. You might reference it a bit in your first offering and then ignore it as the stakeholder sees what the spec produces and realizes the spec wasn't really what they wanted when they see it live.

Once upon a time more weight was given to design, but the industry largely realized that all that very careful effort just became a liability of sunk cost fallacy when they realized the resultant output was not desired, but so much work had gone into the spec we don't want to change.

Nowadays it's a way that PMP minded folks feel like they are core technical contributors without learning to code. This is of course the target audience. Spoke to an executive that sincerely believes the only thing of irreplaceable value is his 'insight' and over 90% of his employees are going to be dismissed since he can just do it all himself. In practice his is the *first* job that could go to LLM, as all he ever says is either obvious stuff or just confidently wrong and his business decisions amount to "all we need is more customers and for them to pay more for it and we will be profitable"... Genius.

Agree about the meaning of "hallucinate" in this context, but...

You can't be sure your brain is deterministic. It may well have features that operate at the quantum level, with the implied genuine uncertainty. Transistors are normally scaled to avoid that problem. This isn't exactly "free will" in any normal sense, but it *is* non-deterministic behavior, at least as far as we can tell. (Yeah, superdeterminism is a valid interpretation of quantum theory, and so is the multi-world interpretation and a few others that take the entire universe as context. So in some sense it's still deterministic, but it's a really weird sense. And as far as the Copenhagen interpretation [i.e. "shut up and calculate"] goes even in that sense it's non-deterministic.)

Fun fact, there has been two Linux distributions officially certified as "UNIX". Inspur and Huawei for whatever reason bothered to get them officially certified.

On the flip side, there's an odd sentence in the XDG specification that explicitly qualifies the wording around filesystem feature requirements to apply only to Unix-like platforms. Clearly they had Unix in mind, but they explicitly bothered to give an implicit pass to any hypothetical non-Unix, non-Unix-like platforms.

Not nearly as irritating as having dozens of random dot subdirectories in the root of your home directory.

The first issue costs a few developers a few days of their time to fix. The second is a problem that nags millions of users for eternity.

I don't think treason could have been made to apply. It's defined in the Constitution, and the definition is a *LOT* stricter than colloquial use.

Ah, but who is the consumer of those resources. Perhaps Google is selling compute to other companies. That could be quite a profitable approach.

Because at this rate, by my math, the number of AI cores Google requires will exceed the number of atoms in the visible universe within about 120 years.