So, it's basically like a Cane Toad then?

I personally didn't like Curiosity Stream when I tried it years ago. The docos always felt a little too close to entertainment for my liking.

My favourite streaming service is The Great Courses. It had a small hiccup when it rebranded as Wondrium for a few years and merged its content with Magellan etc, but the users complained loudly and the company went back to their core competency. I have no problem giving them my money even though I will never get through all the courses they have on offer.

The GP is not talking about LTE, they're talking about "voice over LTE" (VoLTE). The Bell compatibility checker they linked to seems like a fairly comprehensive list of phones that support it. Very old phones, like the iPhone 4 or original Pixel don't support it because the standard didn't exist when they were manufactured.

This article almost sounds like an ad to get people to buy things to keep the economy rolling rather than a serious discussion.

You've answered your question. "Productivity" in this case is GDP / capita. If an American buys something with American parts from an American retailer then they increase the GDP, which increases the productivity. It doesn't have to increase their personal productivity.

It might not even be necessary to fork much. Genuine Arduino hardware is so expensive most people use clones, lots of people use Platform IO instead of the Arduino IDE, and the Arduino core for the newer microcontrollers is not made by Arduino anyway.

Because this is happening in the USA? The land of fake peace plans and stolen elections, where nobody cares about the truth?

It's.....not that simple. When the LLM industry crashes, the US economy will crash with it. The businesses who supply the AI companies will have cash flow and debt problems, and their rich paying customers will be gone. The smaller businesses who have made themselves dependent on AI services today will shut down, because hiring people to replace the services will be too expensive. The new grads will have nowhere to go, especially if they're competing with desperate experienced folks.

Probably Q wormholed it into our galaxy just to mess with us!

It's clearly a biased example intended to make the white collar readers of the WSJ feel good.

In reality, another example of a non-internet job is NBA professional basketball player. Those guys make plenty of money, Internet is NOT required.

But then again, listing those examples would make some of the white collars question their life choices...

Yes, there are corridors and city pairs in the U.S. where high-speed rail could get people from one city to another quickly and efficiently. But what do they do when they get there? How do they get around?

...laura

They should standardize it. Then they'll have three!

The Grand Canal of China is 1776 km. California Aqueduct is 640 km. Los Angeles Aqueduct is 375 km. Rasht known as the "City of Rain" (Shahr-e BÄrÄn) is about 300 km from Tehran. Start digging the aqueduct!

Obviously, many people use Microsoft products, but not productively. You can't use them productively, the latency on their tools is so extreme, it's a fluke if you can get anything approaching “real-time”. Even if we ignored that major issue, the constant feature break, confusing circular portals, broken licensing, predatory licensing, lack of support, and everything else put together, you can't be a professional and a Microsoft user. At best, and I'm being generous, you could be an unwilling fraud posing as a professional, but that's as far as I'll go.

Not to mention, 85%+ of the computers on earth run a Linux / Unix variant. The vast majority of what you use or do, has to be done on Linux or Unix, which really poses the question, why does anyone hold out to be part of the 15%? If Microsoft didn't have a monopoly on preinstalls, I don't think they'd have any desktop share.

It's not the year of Linux on the desktop, that's been a meme for 20+ years. Providing the computer you buy comes preinstalled with Windows 11, Linux isn't going to become the new desktop king, but it already has every other market, so do we care?

Excel is a great example of a terrible and broken program. Contrast Excel against LibreOffice Calc, and it's striking the quality difference, and usability difference. Don't waste time learning Excel, learn Calc, and you'll be fine, then just tell everyone they have to use ODS, and you're off to the races.

If the feature count means 90% of the features are rushed, broken, nonsense, what use is it?