Anything article that isn't about AI is at least holding back the horde.

With the widespread introduction of the farm tractor, we saw an increase in productivity and a decrease in the need for labor in the fields, and a general increase in wages among farm workers. And we are at the point where expert systems and AI are assisting the operation of those tractors, harvesters, planters, and other farm equipment.

But when you look at the AI bubble that is driving PC component sales, and holding the US economy like a tightrope over a great chasm of recessions, one must ask: Who benefits and in what way? When someone is trying to convince you to buy into AI. Be it a startup or a major corporation. What ultimately do they want in return?
Money. But would an end-user pay for AI to the degree to support the approximately $38 billion spent on AI data centers this year?
Of course not. While it's hidden behind B2B transactions, the root of it is that the payoff for AI is mainly going to in advertisement and marketing.
These data centers are going to suck up all the components and electricity so that it can cold call you all day long, so that it can analyze your spending or browsing habits, send you convincing emails and texts that you respond to or click on, or simply organize a social media site to keep your child's eyeballs glued to it.
All the data collection and processing is done so that it can ultimately drill down on exactly how to sell you anything, and the owner of that data will be able to sell it 1000 times over.

Conclusion: AI means you will get more spam. Exponentially more spam. I think 100's or 1000's of times more is a realistic guess.

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.

The greater good...for who?

I mean, in an example....high speed rail from NYC to LA.

I don't know exactly which states they'd pass through, but let's just pick Iowa for shits and giggles.

Now...to keep things "high speed" that means you're NOT going to be stopping much at all between the two end points.

So, this would benefit people in CA and NY, but it gives NO benefit to people in Iowa who would have cities, farmland,all sorts of private properly they'd have to give up for the system.

Why the fuck would anyone in Iowa vote to give things up for this rail system they do not benefit from and actually gain hassle from...?

I wonder if HSR could be placed on parts of the existing interstate highway system to save costs and time.

You're going to just piss off the majority of people that currently use those to drive....those people are also known as "constituents" and can get a politician fired pronto.

Why does everything have to be profitable?

Well, if you want private industry to build it, they need incentive and "profit" is usually the driving motive historically.

Our current US railways were built by private industry.

The govt would just fuck it up and end up being massively expensive with everyone trying to get their cut of it.....especially if it were Federal.

Most roads, water, utilities...that are public...are LOCAL....city, state funded....

As the OP pointed out, the problem is political and social, not technical.

And well...that's PLENTY enough to derail any efforts in the US.

You start mass eminent domain cases taking land from people and cities and well, you're gonna easily have 50+ years alone before the majority of those are settled one way or another.

Also, unless you get long straight shots of track...you're not going to have true High Speed Rail....and part of the obsticals for that is having to stop many times in many cities, turning to go to each one of those.....and if you don't do that and don't have service to many spots along the way.....those cities and states and localities aren't going to go out of their way to help take away land just to have something go speeding by them and be of no use to them there...

And if you can't really get true High Speed rail in.....most of the US will do "so, why bother? We already have highways, cars and planes to travel long distances fast...why do through the huge expense, litigation and hassle of doing rail?

There would be little perceived ROI to the average US citizen.

I mean, why would someone in Iowa give a flying fuck if someone in NYC could ride a fast train to LA?

The US has no excuse. The only reason the US can't do it is corruption and/or incompetence.

Does it not ever occur to you that we in the US might actually LIKE/ENJOY the transportation system we have?

If we wanted all public transport....we'd get it. If we all wanted to live in extreme urban cities stacked on top of each other like rats and sharing walls....we'd do that.

We simply prefer our way of life....with individual transportation.

It also is likely part of a culture difference....that those in the EU never seem to be able to comprehends...in the US we prioritize the individual....whereas ya'll prioritize collectivism....the masses.

You prioritize the 'state'. And we prioritize the person.

And you act as if you way is the only true and "right" way to live.

Why not step back and think that some free people might want to live differently than you do....?

I also very much doubt you will find any blue haired teachers.

I see PLENTY of them, blue and other neon like hair colors on YouTube and TikTok......tons of them teaching kids and ranting far left ideals....

Why would he feel inadequate when, according to a trustworthy source, he's a better boxer than Mike Tyson, fitter than LeBron James, hotter than Tom Brady, one of the top minds in history with a near-Olympian physique, the world's best runway model, better at resurrection than Jesus, the world's best bottom (ahem) (cough) and the ultimate throat goat?

Sooner or later, we'll end up at the point where trying to maintain the ways of the past is a fruitless fight. Teachers' jobs are no longer going to be "to teach" - that that's inevitably getting taken over by AI (for economic reasons, but also because it's a one-on-one interaction with the student, with them having no fear of asking questions, and that at least at a pre-university level, it probably knows the material a lot better than the average teacher, who these days is often an ignorant gym coach or whatnot). Their jobs will be *to evaluate frequently* (how well does the student know things when they don't have access to AI tools?). The future of teachers - nostalgia aside - is as daily exam administrators, to make sure that students are actually doing their studies. Even if said exams were written by and will be graded by AI.

Dig a bit deeper and you can save money by skipping the nuclear-reactor part; just heat the water for your steam turbines with the geothermal heat that's already present down there.

I could not tell you one line of PHP in 2025, though I learned enough in 2004 to write a ticket-sales application with a database. It was for one event, so I picked the famously awful, kludgy, just-for-duct-tape language to get 'er done fast, never need to be maintained.

I have to admit, those calumnies against PHP have faded over the years, and here we are, >20 years later. Some 20 years earlier, I had learned PL/1 at University, the language of our MULTICS mainframe. It was predicted to take over all programming in coming years, unless ADA beat it out. The wisdom of 1983.

Even if the prediction of comparatively controlled impact is accurate; I think it's worth considering just how grim it is likely to be; not in purely economic terms; but in the character of the work.

Maybe this is a personal peculiarity; but I that there's something exquisitely dispiriting about beating your head against people who are stubborn or clueless enough that every conversation is just a baffling sequence of different confusions, some of the repeated from previously. It's a totally different thing from dealing with someone who is merely ignorant; but learning, especially if they are enthusiastic about it.

Even if everything is fine in terms of job pace and security and all; that seems like it is shaping up to be a really hellish aspect of dealing with bots. The experience is sort of a somewhat weirder simulation of dealing with a chirpy, people-pleasing, very-junior type; except they are far more likely to lie than to admit ignorance; and they never learn(possibly the SaaS guys hoovering up your interactions in the background will make the next iteration better, possibly not, progress seems to have slowed considerably after only a brief period of improvement; but a given release is more or less full groundhog day).

That seems like a nightmare. Everything that sucks about teaching or mentoring; but precisely none of the rewarding aspects.

The richest 1% burn through their entire annual carbon share in just 10 days.

Ok. yes. That helps a lot. I think almost all of the items you listed have a GUI on most desktop environments for *nix, GNOME and KDE certainly. And that's part of the challenges with Linux, we say Linux but really mean KDE, GNOME, etc. Because if you had GNOME on Linux and GNOME on FreeBSD, they are more alike from the end-user's perspective than a system with KDE on either OS. And we can do maddening things like have mostly-KDE system with bits of GNOME installed because maybe we like a few of their apps but don't like their panels and widgets.

On GNOME there is a very basic user account dialog, you can edit your name, icon, set password, enable automatic logins. If you want to move your home directory or something, you'll be hitting the command-line. And it's quite easy to screw up, so have a recovery USB stick setup before hand.

Printers I always setup graphically on Linux. It'd been 20 years since I touched printcap or other lpr guts. Apple really did us a huge favor when they upstreamed CUPS. Way easier to setup a Linux box than Windows 11 (my wife's compute never seems to find our old Brother printer)

X11 and Fcitx5 (Wayland) make IME bother powerful and a bit of a complicated set of choices for the end-user to make. Ultimately you can have your input method very customized and working in just about every app, certainly everything that is using GTK or QT. But even old school stuff like xterm does indeed work (I use IME for emoji shortcuts in xterm & hexchat)

For both GNOME and KDE, there is an accessibly settings menu. You can turn on the screen reader and get most apps to do TTS when you focus on a window or GUI element. Using either the mouse or tab key to change focus. More detailed settings were hidden by the GNOME team, there is a gnome-tweaks utility to get at them but it's annoying they dropped a lot of "advanced options" from the main settings window.
Slackware Linux from the mid-1990's had screen reader and braille terminal support at the installer (I think BRLTTY), so the hobbyist teletype OSes have long been winning at accessibility.

For restoring the system to an earlier configuration, there isn't a good out of the box experience. If you have the foresight, you can easily install a program like Timeshift and have a GUI and even automate your snapshots. But I don't know of any distro that have any of this setup for you in advance. I think in part because there isn't an agreement on which backup software is "best" or how to have sane defaults that work for most people. I think as Linux starts moving to using Btrfs by default on the main distros, the answer will be obvious and cheap. Until then people are going to be using rsync or Restic with some GUI or shell script wrapper. Powerful and flexible, but unlikely to ever see any kind of backups made by 99% of Linux users.

Ubuntu added the ability to update, install, or blacklist graphics drivers and other proprietary drivers. Giving you fine-grained control. If you want to install the latest NVIDIA driver before your distro vendor has pulled it in, that's going to be a command-line affair and not well supported. But if you wait for Ubuntu, Fedora, etc to packaged it, it should offer an automatic update option several weeks after the vendor released. (not ideal, but trying to be honest here)

Overall, Linux and *BSD can function as a desktop OS. Now would most people prefer the experience the *nix desktop GUIs over macOS or Windows? Probably not, more a matter of preference now though than any significant superiority. But I think most days on any modern OS can be done entirely in a GUI. And there's a few things on Windows you still have to do with cmd line, if you are ever unfortunate enough to find yourself in that situation.