I wish MS just with Win 2K and incrementally upgraded. Made it solidly 64-bit, increased the file system capacity, and so on. By now, it would be awesome.

Do you for Microsoft?

MS forces you to spend time, money, and effort, on "upgrades" you don't want.

The solution? Spend more time, money and effort, to fix the crappy useless "upgrades."

Just stay with Win 10, or switch to Linux.

Lots of people use phones as their "desktop."

Technically, phones and tablets are not desktops, or laptops, but lots of people use phones, or tablets, as their primary, or only, computer device.

China has been acting very aggressively lately. They act like a bully. I believe China is committed to bringing down the USA. I am not sure I want to buy pharmaceuticals from them.

I have never used Jellyfin. Put I am not fond on the new Plex UI.

A big nation like China can have HSR. A tiny nation like Java can have HSR. France, Switzerland, everywhere else can have HSR. But it will not work in the USA.

How is the USA so different than every other nation on earth?

I felt the same. I am glad people are trying Linux, but I see nothing special about Zorin.
I suppose it looks like windows, and it was marketed well.
IMO: MX Linux looks more promising.

It may be hard for California, but not for anywhere else. High speed rail is all over the world. Even the tiny nation of Java has high speed rail.

As I understand it, China may have as much high speed rail as the rest of the world combined. Practically all of it built within the last 15 years.
No fatalities.

"If I go find an actor/actress that I like the sound of their voice of, and want to create a weird golem of a voice, what I'd do is get several 48khz 16-bit recordings from audio books of that actor, run it through the training (because I have their voice and the book they are reading) and then find a performance style of that actor/actress I want (from maybe a movie or or television show) and thus "skin" that voice to sound like that performance. That will give me a 95% reasonable sounding voice for all the words from the books they read, and a 10% accuracy on words that they never ever said before.

And of course you would contact the appropriate copyright clearinghouse or actors' association and pay the associated fees for using those voices, which the massive IP theft organizations known as "AI" do not.

That's what the big bosses tell us anyway. In a somewhat obscure corner of the human experience where I sometimes hang out there are ~5 web sites of varying ages that write and publish original and meaningful things. But if you search for that obscurity on Google you will now be directed to 847 "sites", "magazine articles", "experts", etc of which 842 are thinly disguised machine-rewritten versions of the 5 real sites - the kind of rewriting I would have instantly flagged as plagiarism back in my TA days - wrapped up in phony autogenerated web sites, documents, articles, etc.

Most people aren't authors or painters who earn a direct living from their creative work (of which there are very few), but most people put some amount of creative effort into their jobs and livelihoods. Whether it is a financial analyst in a cubicle who develops independent analyses of the prospects of an investment target, a graphic artist who creates flyers and web sites for small businesses, or an electrician who figures out a better way to route cabling through a standard spec house during construction they can all recognize that the self-styled "AI" vendors are just stealing their creative labor with zero compensation and feeding it into a spicy chatbot labeled "AI" which is going to be used by their bosses to put them out of work.

I think HBO was one of the first, or the first, cable channel.
HBO did not have ads in the 1980s.

" 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.

I have heard the suit used to be green. But Coca-Cola made it red, and that stuck.