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.

They don't have the authority to arbitrarily decide where to put fracking wells either. Or mines, or oil rigs, or chemical factories...

In fact they technically get permits to do basically everything everything they do. Or at least that used to be the case when the EPA actually meant something. Never stopped them from completely fucking everything up to save money though, did it? And I bet you know it.

I guarantee that if any of these get built and fails, the way the public finds out about it is someone noticing a spike in cancer rates.
=Smidge=

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.

I re-state a question I have asked before:

Just how much more abuse will their customers take? When will users of Microsoft (or Apple) operating systems finally say ENOUGH? How much is too much? How far is too far? When will people finally say "all we wanted was a sold reliable OPERATING SYSTEM!" and turn their backs on these corporate dictators?

YOU own a computer and you want an OS for it... but THEY say when you MUST update, what features you MUST accept, where your files will be stored, who can see those files, they snoop on your keystrokes and mouse movements, monitor your media use... of, all for YOUR benefit of course...pay no attention to who might be monitizing it and using it to manipulate you and/or society generally...

The thing that worries me a bit is this: There are sadly too many in the Linux and BSD communities who look at Microsoft and Apple as things to emulate and keep seeming to think that Linux and BSD (and probably any other future OS somebody might write) needs to absorb a lot of the same badness.

First, No, for the following reasons:

1. The US was the originator of heavier-than-air powered flight, and thus the first-adopter and standard setter as well as the hub for much of the innovation in aviation. This lead to the early adoption of airlines and related entrepreneurship and the rapid build-out of airfields and related infrastructure. After WWI and again after WWII the US got the benefit of all those returning trained and experienced pilots... lots of stuff contributed to Americans adopting air travel. The US economy has also been heavily geared to productivity and the best use of man-hours, which lead to the highest-valued things (people) moving on the fastest means (air). The phrase "Time is money" applies here.

2. World War II and the post-war years saw the US move people to the skies and cargo to the rails. At the start of WWII and during the war, Americans who traveled by commercial means generally did so by train (unless they were rich). American soldiers often started their adventure on a train ride from small town America to boot camp, then took trains to a port city, and a ship to Europe or Asia. By the Korean War, they did so by plane. The American people themselves chose to fly for civilian trips and stop using passenger rail service except on short-haul runs within several metropolitan areas - so the rails were largely left to freight haulers, who did what American industry loves to do: optimize. The US rail system is now the most efficient on the planet - for moving FREIGHT. As a result, the US freight trains and operators have priority on the rails.

3. People in other countries may have much longer vacations, typical Americans use air travel to optimize their time-off. If you have two weeks off per year, you do not want to burn any of that time unnecessarily on the travel, unless the travel itself is what you want (like a train ride through the Rockies). American companies also do not like to waste employee hours on travel or burn money on travel, so when they send somebody somewhere it's going to be by plane rather than the slower AND more expensive Amtrak. It's Time Management, and planes always win that one.

4. Congress gave Amtrak, a quasi-government entity, control over all passenger rail travel. Their routes are sparse, their schedules are a joke, their prices are higher than the price for flying, their trips take too long (often multiple DAYS) so you need to eat their food on board (which is insanely expensive) and many of their routes are incomplete and deceptive (you'll need to get off the train at some point, board a Greyhound bus for several hours, then get onto a different train to resume the trip (in other words: you're NOT going to get a good sleep on that leg of the trip with that sleeper ticket you bought...) People HATE this type of bait-and-switch, and with ZERO competition even allowed, Amtrak has never had ANY incentive to up their game and make American rail passenger service anything but a novelty other than in the "Acela corridor" (the all-important Washington DC to New York City routes used by media people and politicians who Amtrak must keep happy).

5. America is criss-crossed with rails built in the era of the steam locomotive. Nobody is willing to spend the money to convert all that to rails that can handle true high speed trains. There are also too many crossings and the right-of-way in many places is too narrow for either an upgrade, or adding new parallel rails. Where the rails are no longer being used for freight, they're generally abandoned, rather than upgraded.

6. There are two separate programs in the US currently operating supersonic test aircraft that generate reduced sonic booms. Both projects aim to enable supersonic airliners. In the referenced article, CNN even admits that plane travel is 1/3 the time of high speed rail, but that gap will INCREASE (favoring planes even more in the American mind) with supersonic airliners if they're finally allowed to operate over CONUS, which appears likely.

7. Americans move their families for career reasons and such more frequently than people in many other countries along with economic shifts partially affected by the differences between various states as politics change taxes and regulations in states relative to each other etc. As a result, travel patterns shift more rapidly than in some other nations. With air travel as the primary people mover, this is easily and cheaply handled (only the planes and airports are affected). With trains, one needs to deal with thousands of miles of rails and rights of way issues to add/move routes.

Now for the exception:

The ONE way for rail to beat air travel, and it certainly COULD if the people invested in legacy rail would get out of the way (or change completely) would be to move to low-pressure or vacuum-tube trains. This could be stuff like Musk's Hyperloops or the older notion of trains in tunnels pumped free of air. In these scenarios, all the advantages of trains beat planes, AND the trains could even go at supersonic (or even hypersonic, which airliners will NEVER do for energy and thermal reasons) speeds with no (or reduced) friction/compression/drag/heating issues. In a tube at vacuum, a train could go far faster than anything but a space plane or a point-to-point Starship, AND there'd be no crossings or right-of-way or eminent domain problems, and no costs for the purchase of vast swaths of land etc. No animal strikes, no derailments, no intersections, no collisions, perfectly designed slopes and curves because the path is not owned by anybody else or used by anything else... the tunnels are a winner. A vacuum tube train underground from LA to NYC that could accelerate half way there and decelerate the second half of the trip with NO speed limit would be a short trip (do the math).

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.

I, for one, have complete confidence in corporate industry's ability and willingness to respect the environment and the safety of the general public.

=Smidge= /s

Sure. So do fairy dust and unicorn farts. Just as soon as we have the fairy dust harvesting operations and unicorn fart extractors up and running - oh, and solve the pesky problem of capturing magical creatures - and actually establish even a basic baseline of the real cost, they will clearly outcompete renewables. That seems to be your argument in a nutshell.

So, you're not even hand waving away all the technical problems with fusion reactors (beyond the ones I myself ignored such as actually getting a stable, repeatable breakeven reaction to work in the first place), but simply completely ignoring that I even mentioned them? Name-dropping the concept of economy of scale does not explain how fundamental issues will be solved. If you're going to be honest about this at all, then you need to actually address how those problems will be solved. Just mentioning Helion and CFS and claiming that their existence proves that they have solved these problems is nuts. Seriously, Helion was supposed to have net energy 8/9 years ago and a working 50 MWe plant 6 years ago. Where are they now? CFS does not appear to be outright lying about their timeline in the same way as Helion obviously is, but they are clearly still overly optimistic. Their plan for shielding the gear used to generate the magnetic shielding is a "molten salt blanket". It seems like a pure fantasy to believe that electronics won't be burned out beyond repair every few months or less. It is hard to believe there could possibly be an operational cost per unit of heat that would be lower than a fission reactor and, once again, the rest of the plant will still need to be a giant steam engine.

Basically, you're just fantasizing about possible future technology. All well and good, but there are certain technologies we have now and for possible future technologies, there are varying degrees of probability of their success. Holding out for what is currently just science fiction will not help us now. Calling me -- the one advocating for basing energy policy on systems that actually exist in the here and now -- nuts seems deeply ironic here.

Well, to be fair, one of the reasons they maybe don't explain things so well is that their plan is basically to "blot out the sun". Basically, they plain to stain the sky so that less sun will get through. While, yes, this would reduce temperatures on Earth, it would also dim the sun, which means that, among other issues, agricultural land will become less productive. They obviously don't want to go into the consequences of that or who will pay for the damages to every farmer on Earth.

First, how is any of that the "same old song and dance"? When has this played out before in history?

As far as EV's go, there is no real issue with producing enough power to operate an EV. If there were, then there would be an equally as large or larger problem with fueling up an equivalent ICEV. There's no whining involved, it's just basic supply and demand economics.

As for natural gas, most people are not dumb enough to not realize it is a fossil fuel. Electric heating for homes using heat pumps is vastly more efficient than any form of fossil fuel heating, including gas. Electric cooking is also considerably more efficient than gas cooking with the right equipment.

As for the bit about clear cutting forests for genetically engineered crops and data centers.... You really lost me there. What does that have to do with the topic? How do you think in any way that there is any significant overlap between people who want renewable power and those who want to clear cut forests to plant GE crops and put up data centers?