" Pack 9 million people into a "linear" city.."

The Chicago metropolitan area is a linear city of 9 million, more if you include the corridor up to Kenosha and Milwaukee. At its peak the city of Chicago was 3.2 million alone. However, it grew that way in the historic human pattern of part luck, part planning, part ignoring some of the planning, part haphazard human desire/greed/whim.

City regions that are created by force of one will and an ironclad design (Brasilia) seldom work - Canberra is the only one I can think of.

If something has never proven to have worked can it ever be said to have failed? A riddle fit for Bilbo.

"I plan on starting an AI company that just sits around and talks about AI companies.

Therefore I need at least eleventy-bazillion nVidia GPUs and three nuclear power plants worth of juice."

I am prepared to invest $2 billion into your startup. Please advise where to wire funds. Thanks you oh so much for this ground floor opportunity! /s

At some point people are going to realize that Ouroboros or a mobius strip takes you nowhere and just costs you money to keep circling forever.

(maybe the smart Wall Street money already has. Hmmm....)

There is a history of what we would now call industrial engineering and human factors going back at least as far as the first written records that shows that working more than a reasonable number of hours per week for any length of time leads to colossal decreases in productivity and quality, not to mention safety. If you have to work 18 hour days for two or even three weeks to get the crop in, yeah, that will work, but trying to keep human beings on this kind of schedule for very long leads to failure, burnout, and health problems up to and including death.

I'm glad you looked up the real number as I usually see estimates of 65% of USians or something like that living in apartments (zero of which have chargers installed in the parking lot of course).

But what you are saying is that no progress can be made on the other 66% who can install a home charger until absolutely every possible case is covered, which is not out of touch but simply pro-Big Oil propaganda.

Here come the edge cases! Apartments! Towing a trailer from San Diego to Maine. Driving from Little Rock to Boise to return that tool you borrowed but being back in time for work at 0700. Nothing is decided until everything is decided.

Sure, whatever.

Auto industry analysts and enthusiasts alike have a hard time understanding how Stellantis is still in business, particularly now that they have screwed up the Jeep line in North America. I wouldn't take them as indicative of anything.

Beg to differ a bit: while GM made some missteps, particularly in handing the VOLTEC technology over to their PRC subsidiary and dropping it in North America, they took their time to develop a well-engineered and manufacturable EV platform for the next 10-15 years. The problem is their executive team is now living in fear of what a fascist regime could do to them if they don't toe the line and that has given the anti-progress faction at GM operations HQ the chance to counterattack and put anchors on EV marketing and sales. Really a shame and it will cost them dearly over the next 20 years [1].

[1] the anti-progress faction at GM will be well-retired to their backwoods Michigan cabins with their 2,847hp offroad pickup trucks by then

There's only one question in my mind: when the United States wakes up 10 years from now and realizes we have fallen 20 years behind in basic and applied science, EVs, public transportation, and re-creating our built environment to center humans instead of machines (ok, we're already 30 years behind on that last) WHO ARE WE GOING TO BLAME?!? SOMEONE DID THIS TO US - THEY MUST BE PUNISHED!!!

"Electric vehicles are one of those things that are a really good idea in theory but out in the real world they are just simply unworkable. "

EVs are like the apocryphal bumblebee: they don't work in theory, yet millions of people use them every day with no more serious inconvenience than ICE vehicles experience from time to time (e.g. the mythical 'range anxiety' = running out of gas on a back road).

I've had people give me long lectures about the un-usability of EVs while I have driven them across the city, errands, and back on purely electric power in my PHEV.

Imagine, a small hits a satellite and the satellite sends out a shitload of shards moving at extremely high speed. And then some of those hit a sky data centre and cause a cascading (Kessler) effect. Of it the meteor hits the much larger data centre directly. We already know we are walking a fine line of losing a significant proportion of satellites if there are collisions.

Or worse, what if some bad player shoots a missile into one of those centres? This would cause orders of magnitude worse results than a simple collision. If a cloud of debris started orbiting, it could knock out a large portion of the world's computing power (assuming most adopted this silly idea). If most of the data centres were put in space and that worst case scenario happened, the whole world would shut down. And if you moved the centres far enough apart in space, they would be so high up the communications lag would have just as bad a consequence.

For shit like this, you have to plan for worst case. It's why they put berms around terrestrial data centres and have enough security to protect a gold repository, just about. Right now, there is no way to protect against a Kessler Syndrome/Effect/Event if it happens.

"You don't need to know how to learn; In fact don't need to know anything. Just ask 'Brother AI', he will tell you everything." [In a soothing big brother voice.]
Keep the masses ignorant and only tell them stuff you want them to hear. It's the next step in making the rich richer, and the poor poorer.
.

RFK Jr can also point you to a company selling magic juices, fully natural of course, that will prevent cancer. No connection with his own bank account.

"But I HAVE to be able to hitch the travel trailer to the pickup and drive to Grandma's house in Maine with half my household goods aboard every summer!"

[Narrator: last time he made that drive was in 2018]

The ability of archaic ICE vehicle lovers to come up with absurd edge cases for everyday persons (note: not long distance trucks, farm equipment, or heavy machinery which will probably need diesel engines for a long time yet) never ceases to amuse me. Yeah, sure, you need to drive to Boise and back this afternoon; gotcha.