Because an Interstate can carry more people and cargo, and far more flexibly than a railroad.

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.

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.

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.

Are you unready or ill equipped for the conversation about making them not stab-happy in the first place? Because you leapt rapidly to throwing away the key.

Oh look, a one-issue sock puppet has shown up to Charlie Kirk the discussion.

So then the hard part is creating the reactors which don't exist, as usual. It's a weakness shared by literally every proposed SMR project.

That's not what "native" means.

Who invented pluggable file formats anyway? The first place I experienced it was AmigaOS 2.0. NeXTStep had reusable controls but AFAIK it didn't provide formats to all installed applications.

by playing video games all day

You'll be a hemorrhoid fixer, playing Assteroids.

The whole point of dark energy is to explain why the cosmos is expanding more than it theoretically should be. If it isn't, then you don't need dark energy, or if it isn't expanding as much as formerly believed then you don't need as much of it.