No they're not. You're exaggerating. The majority of these developments are still empty. China's declining birth rates coupled with the increased mortality from COVID have thrown in a monkey wrench into their planning. Up to 80 million units are still empty, with slim prospects for ever being bought or even used as social housing. Most of them are just crumbling ruins at this point. Even where people have moved in (often with heavy government subsidies, essentially turning units into an eastern Section 8 housing project), occupancy is still under 10%. They simply built too many units, and there aren't enough people to live in them. Some developments are being reclaimed for agriculture, with farmers grazing livestock and plowing fields on the strips of land between crumbing concrete structures.

Well, it's not really AI in any sense of the honest term; it's not a self aware machine. AI has become a marketing term for servers running a bunch of fancy scripts that produce dialogue that can pass for human speech fairly well. BUT... AI is a game changer economically because those fancy scripts are already killing jobs, jobs that won't be replaced by something else. So in that sense, AI isn't "bullshit". It's an extinction level event for entire classes of formerly human work. And the economic and social and political crisis that it will create has clearly already began.

This presupposes that they don't get plenty of "real world" while they're homeschooling. As if they're in some hermetically sealed environment where bad things never touch them. When we homeschooled ours, one of my wife's single friends objected, asking us "what about socialization?". Well, what about it? There's still plenty of it with friends and family, church, and play. And when they're young adults, they're better able to deal with the scum of the world than a pre-teen or teenager thrown into the cage match that is modern public schools where you can't get to them. School is supposed to be about education, not be a Thunderdome where the weak are weeded out for the coming apocalypse. Whatever my sons missed in public schools, they're far better off not being in a concrete box where some hulking delinquent 3 to 4 years older than all his class peers is punching teachers or pulling a gun on students.

It's the Christmas season. Everybody loves a two-for-one deal.

Oregon isn't Nigeria. All of the worker creature comforts aren't being flown in at great expense because local infrastructure and services are shit. Houses and restaurants are being built. Stores are being built. That means employing the locals for the most part, raising their wages and improving their infrastructure.

There are downsides to big companies coming into small towns. I live in one, and the increased traffic and general hassle of more people annoys the fuck out of me. But our standard of living has most definitely gone up, not down.

This is heavily dependent upon what the major is. Huge numbers of college grads get degrees that do them absolutely no good in the workplace. There are legions of grads working in jobs that don't require college.

A chemical engineering major is going to make so much bank that he can pay off his loans in a very short time and have a high amount of disposable income. The Sociology grad working a telemarketer job, not so much. He's sitting at a table with co-workers that in many cases didn't even graduate high school.

An actual game changer (literally) would be native Steam and GOG clients for Linux and BSD. Windows would still be, percentage-wise, the king of desktop gaming, but you'd see a mighty river of players move over to Unix systems if those two things came to fruition.

You can still get them, they just tend to be expensive because they're "commercial grade" by default if it's a Samsung. Sceptre still makes low end affordable non-smart TV's for a pretty good price. A 50' is under $250 at Wal Mart. We have a Sceptre 55' in our living room. All smart stuff is through HDMI Roku sticks. The sound on Sceptres tend to suck, but we picked up a nice Sony sound bar for under $99, and it's slim enough to fit under it. So, tax and all, you're still getting everything you want for under $400.

And that has what to do with his point? He's right. With very, very few exceptions.... guys like Bill Maher... the kind of people that mock Christians would never have the balls to do the same in the same manner to Muslims. That makes them cowards, hypocrites, or both.

What kind of performance hit did you notice? I'm considering giving it a try, as some older games are the only thing really keeping me on Windows at home. I've been steadily moving non-gaming family members to Linux Mint and Chrome OS Flex with the Win11 hardware apocalypse. I'm very interested in first hand reports on how well these games work in the real world with the translation layer factor. I'm assuming there has to be at least some kind of performance hit, so I'd like know your experiences with it.

LOL. How long have you been here? Because personal stalkers have been a tradition here as a long as Natalie Portman's hot grits, Stephen King dying, and Netcraft confirming that FreeBSD is dead.

Pretty sure that whatever it is, it involves some translation of Fuck the English.

I always thought that pressing those thousands of old turbojets just sitting in storage into service for backup generators would be a good idea rather than junking them. All it would take would be one enterprising CEO to start snatching them up and when word got out, there would suddenly be a run on boneyards everywhere.

Or do what my schools did: ban them in the classroom and give plenty of pop quizzes. If you can't do the work on your own successfully in class with nothing but your pencil, paper, and brain, you fail. Period. Today's entitled mommies will scream, but fuck 'em.

I don't know what era you grew up in, but when I was a child, Sears and Pennys were direct competitors. Sears just had a better catalog and automotive section. People going to malls would go to both to see who had the better deal on competing items. Especially for clothing. Montgomery Ward was a competitor, but they were the Chrysler to Sears/Penney's GM and Ford, the third wheel that no one went to first.