The USA used to have vocational schools. Many of them were high schools. They taught draftsmanship, printing, auto mechanics, and other trades. There were also one and two year schools that would teach people how to be plumbers and electricians and diesel mechanics. Over the last couple decades we lost that. Instead everyone was going to work in The Service Economy. Lots of those service economy jobs were either outshored or never even existed. Thousands of people who would have been fine with a vocational degree ended up tens of thousands of dollars in debt with a degree that cannot pay for itself. This is a failure of leadership by parents, principals, school boards, politicians, and of course by the colleges that marketed themselves as the newer, better vocational schools. This isn't just an American problem, it's even worse in China. We need to stop pretending that college is for everyone and return to the days of educating people for a realistic future instead of pretending that there will be an endless supply of jobs for anyone with a degree in anything.

The noise probably comes from the equipment that sucks air out to maintain the vacuum.

Depending on when it pops many of the datacenters may not have been built. The ones that have been built might not have power, and (in the USA) by the time all those big Westinghouse reactors and small SMRs have been built the datacenters might be obsolete and not worth updating without big AI customers. So there's a possibility that they'll just end up abandoned building complexes in the desert.

I mostly agree with you, but I think it might be unfair to the average American voter. Imagine that you live in West Virginia or Missouri, and you're struggling to get by, as many people are. Your wages haven't kept pace with inflation. You can't afford a house, and the price of houses seems to be rising faster than wages. Big companies have left your town to setup shop overseas, and your neighbors are out of work. Your health insurance sucks and is anything but universal. One big illness could wipe you out. When your wife had a kid, she got 6 weeks(!) of maternity leave, and had to be back at work.

Then you look at the US armed forces... there are 13(?) aircraft carriers that outmatch everything else on the ocean. Stealth bombers that look like spaceships. NASA launching huge rockets at enormous expense to go land people on the moon, when they already did that 45 years ago. A huge nuclear arsenal. This is all to be the world's police, and to provide a security umbrella to Europe.

And then you look at Europe, with their two years of maternity leave, and worker protections, and way more paid holidays, and universal healthcare, and they all like to look down their noses at Americans, while they benefit from a massive security umbrella that the US provides, which frees up the funds to spend on social programs.

Everyone thinks the MAGA crowd are traditional conservatives. Sure, there are some, but the core group of voters used to be democrats. They were union workers, laborers. They saw their savior in Bernie Sanders, and when the dems wouldn't let him run, they decided to follow the other populist voice. Is Trump lying to them? Absolutely.

I don't relate to MAGA at all. But I get it. The security arrangement might have been good for the US in general, but it hasn't been good for the average American worker. That's why we're here.

And there are going to be austerity measures coming to all of Europe. Those social programs are going to shrink. Right at a time when everyone's arming themselves to the teeth. How do you think that's going to play out?

I appreciate the average American's sentiment who want Europe to pay for its own defense. However, there's a lot of American history in the 20th century and before which brought us to this point deliberately. After being drawn into two huge world wars, started by member states of a continent that had continually been at war with themselves, the United States came up with a plan to prevent it from happening again. They invited everyone into an alliance structure where anyone could trade with anyone else, and the US would guarantee free navigation of the oceans so they didn't need big navies, and would provide security guarantees so that the countries of Europe didn't feel the need to arm themselves to the teeth. This arrangement is expensive for the US, but not so expensive as a world war 3. And it worked to prevent WW3 for many decades. Now that the generations who fought those wars are gone, we've forgotten the lessons, and I'm afraid we're doomed to repeat them. European have not evolved. Their geographic and political reality encourages wars among their own states. And as much as the US wants to stay out of it, they invariably get dragged back in every time.

If you apply "old school" industrial automation to a partly manual process, then getting 40% more worker productivity is hardly surprising. China, despite its rapid growth, is still in the final stages of industrializing. There's still lots of efficiency to be had. The US has been putting robots in factories since the 70's, so most of the low hanging fruit is already automated.

Also, beware what people are calling AI. In the industrial automation space, every vendor has been calling their product "AI" for the last 5 or 10 years. When you press them on it, it's often no more advanced than a PID controller or a few if/then statements. Our plant is more willing to take on new ideas than most, but the only real AI that I've seen installed on a plant floor over the last decade were some advanced vision-enabled picking systems. I'm sure someone has hooked an LLM to a plant-floor system somewhere, but I've not seen it yet. Nor have I seen a humanoid robot or a robot dog pay for itself. Even cobots only have mediocre uptake (but we are using them).

And finally, take stories out of China with a grain of salt. Yes, there's massive industrialization going on there, and the engineers working there are smart and motivated, but the government interferes heavily in the market. For instance, I've heard first-hand accounts from people on business trips there, where a truck was offloading several brand new CNC milling machines at a manufacturer, and the story was that these were just machines that the government had purchased and provided the company with the idea, "here, put these to good use." There's constant top-down subsidies being handed out, and it results in huge over-production problems. There are parking lots full of brand new EVs that dealers have written off because they can't sell them all. There are fields of solar panels producing power that can't get to market because there isn't enough local demand, and the power lines to the major centers aren't big enough to support the whole load.

Please check your reading comprehension. I specifically said I was "in favour of paying the fee when you renewed your license plate for the year, where you have to submit your vehicle mileage anyway." As in, your odometer reading. No need for a GPS at all.

Thanks for replying to my post without even reading it. I appreciate it.

Not surprising at all. This was a concern that was raised over a decade ago, even in discussions here on /.

The fact is that road maintenance needs to be paid, and it was long thought that charging taxes on gasoline was a good way to fund roads because it was simple to implement, it scales with how far you drive, and it also scales with the size of your vehicle (larger vehicles do more damage to the roads). So it was relatively fair. It also didn't require invasive data collection, such as how far or where you drove your vehicle.

When it was first discussed here on /., the consensus opinion was that if you drove an EV, you should have a GPS tracker installed in your car that measured how far you drove. We used to have big discussions here about privacy, and the privacy advocates thought that a government mandated GPS tracking you everywhere you went would be an overreach by government. I was generally in favour of paying the fee when you renewed your license plate for the year, where you have to submit your vehicle mileage anyway.

Of course now we voluntarily GPS track ourselves and send the data to our corporate overlords, so that all seems like a moot point.

Will this new law also apply to those crazy guys that power their diesel cars off used french fry grease they get from restaurants?

In other news, the catholic church is suing OpenAI because they had the idea to simply make suicide illegal a thousand years ago and have been using it ever since.

Not sure if it's a trade secret or a copyright case, the news often don't mention the fine details.

That's a good point. Here on /. I can assume people know what open world games are. Out in the real world movies are probably the better analogy.

OpenAI will be fine. They just need a few more infusions of cash from Microsoft, AMD, Nvidia, and Oracle that they can use to buy stuff from Microsoft, AMD, Nvidia, and Oracle. This can go on forever because this is not a scam. Just trust your capitalist masters, they are CEOs and in America CEOs know what's best for us all,

BYD makes the best cars. They're also very well priced. Europe is keeping BYD out of their markets with tariffs. So BYD is setting up a plant in Europe. Trump knows that American tariffs cannot keep BYD from opening a plant here. So to make sure that Tesla, Ford, and GM keep cranking out poorly engineered and overpriced cars BYD has been put on a bad list.

Conspicuous consumption. People want to be seen with the flashy array of cameras on the latest high end iPhone.

The movie analogy is old and outdated.

I'd compare it to a computer game. In any open world game, it seems that there are people living a life - going to work, doing chores, going home, etc. - but it's a carefully crafted illusion. "Carefully crafted" in so far as the developers having put exactly that into the game that is needed to suspend your disbelief and let you think, at least while playing, that there are real people. But behind the facade, they are not. They just disappear when entering their homes, they have no actual desires just a few numbers and conditional statements to switch between different pre-programmed behaviour patterns.

If done well, it can be a very, very convincing illusion. I'm sure that someone who hasn't seen a computer game before might think that they are actual people, but anyone with a bit of background knowledge knows they are not.

For AI, most of the people simply don't (yet?) have that bit of background knowledge.