We should call it "job incomplete".

Most common metals have a simple one or two syllable name: Iron, Copper, Tin, Zinc, Lead, Nickel, Silver, Gold, etc.

The USA recognized that to some extent and got started by chopping off one extraneous syllable, paring it down from five to four. However, once it was realized that Al would be a common everyday material like iron, we should have gone ahead and pruned it all the way down to two syllables, maybe something like "Alem".

It doesn't. What it means is cutting through a lot of big parcels whose owners have big money, so they can be big impediments. There has to be a happier medium than this between respect for individual private property ownership and the needs of the many, but we are clearly uninterested in finding it in this country.

The greater good...for who?

I mean, in an example....high speed rail from NYC to LA.

I don't know exactly which states they'd pass through, but let's just pick Iowa for shits and giggles.

Now...to keep things "high speed" that means you're NOT going to be stopping much at all between the two end points.

So, this would benefit people in CA and NY, but it gives NO benefit to people in Iowa who would have cities, farmland,all sorts of private properly they'd have to give up for the system.

Why the fuck would anyone in Iowa vote to give things up for this rail system they do not benefit from and actually gain hassle from...?

I wonder if HSR could be placed on parts of the existing interstate highway system to save costs and time.

You're going to just piss off the majority of people that currently use those to drive....those people are also known as "constituents" and can get a politician fired pronto.

Why does everything have to be profitable?

Well, if you want private industry to build it, they need incentive and "profit" is usually the driving motive historically.

Our current US railways were built by private industry.

The govt would just fuck it up and end up being massively expensive with everyone trying to get their cut of it.....especially if it were Federal.

Most roads, water, utilities...that are public...are LOCAL....city, state funded....

As the OP pointed out, the problem is political and social, not technical.

And well...that's PLENTY enough to derail any efforts in the US.

You start mass eminent domain cases taking land from people and cities and well, you're gonna easily have 50+ years alone before the majority of those are settled one way or another.

Also, unless you get long straight shots of track...you're not going to have true High Speed Rail....and part of the obsticals for that is having to stop many times in many cities, turning to go to each one of those.....and if you don't do that and don't have service to many spots along the way.....those cities and states and localities aren't going to go out of their way to help take away land just to have something go speeding by them and be of no use to them there...

And if you can't really get true High Speed rail in.....most of the US will do "so, why bother? We already have highways, cars and planes to travel long distances fast...why do through the huge expense, litigation and hassle of doing rail?

There would be little perceived ROI to the average US citizen.

I mean, why would someone in Iowa give a flying fuck if someone in NYC could ride a fast train to LA?

The US has no excuse. The only reason the US can't do it is corruption and/or incompetence.

Does it not ever occur to you that we in the US might actually LIKE/ENJOY the transportation system we have?

If we wanted all public transport....we'd get it. If we all wanted to live in extreme urban cities stacked on top of each other like rats and sharing walls....we'd do that.

We simply prefer our way of life....with individual transportation.

It also is likely part of a culture difference....that those in the EU never seem to be able to comprehends...in the US we prioritize the individual....whereas ya'll prioritize collectivism....the masses.

You prioritize the 'state'. And we prioritize the person.

And you act as if you way is the only true and "right" way to live.

Why not step back and think that some free people might want to live differently than you do....?

I also very much doubt you will find any blue haired teachers.

I see PLENTY of them, blue and other neon like hair colors on YouTube and TikTok......tons of them teaching kids and ranting far left ideals....

Why would he feel inadequate when, according to a trustworthy source, he's a better boxer than Mike Tyson, fitter than LeBron James, hotter than Tom Brady, one of the top minds in history with a near-Olympian physique, the world's best runway model, better at resurrection than Jesus, the world's best bottom (ahem) (cough) and the ultimate throat goat?

Sooner or later, we'll end up at the point where trying to maintain the ways of the past is a fruitless fight. Teachers' jobs are no longer going to be "to teach" - that that's inevitably getting taken over by AI (for economic reasons, but also because it's a one-on-one interaction with the student, with them having no fear of asking questions, and that at least at a pre-university level, it probably knows the material a lot better than the average teacher, who these days is often an ignorant gym coach or whatnot). Their jobs will be *to evaluate frequently* (how well does the student know things when they don't have access to AI tools?). The future of teachers - nostalgia aside - is as daily exam administrators, to make sure that students are actually doing their studies. Even if said exams were written by and will be graded by AI.

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.

This in turn strongly suggests they knew how to position themselves in a marketing perspective in a way that shows all the other more venerable distros out there really dropped the ball.

I don't think so. I think it's more a case of Zorin being the only Linux distro that made an effort to have a look and feel that's as close to Windows as possible so as to make it easy for Windows refugees to make the transition.

Personally, I prefer Sam Gross' take on that: An Elephant is soft and mushy.

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.

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.

MacOS has its own barriers to calling itself a professional operating system. A good part of my job is forcing it to conform to basic enterprise system management practices.