On average, I've actually been very happy with the use of AI chatbots for phone support.

The reason for this is that, for lower tier support (as well as a fair chunk of things I need done that can be handled by lower support), the support agents are largely working off of scripts that they are not allowed to deviate from, nor do they have the expertise to understand what they are doing.

While the AI is not necessarily as intelligent or capable as a human *CAN* be, in practice it is often more capable than the first-tier support agent that it has replaced, due to the breadth of its training data. If I need something that requires cognitive tasks that exceed the AI's context window, I can request escalation.

This is in stark contrast to the bad old days where I waste time talking to the bottom tier support where I usually need to spend a long time explaining what I want done, wind up requesting to be escalated anyway, or try to battle with a dumb non-AI menu-based agent bot to even get to speak to a human (and usually that human is still bottom-tier support who I have the same problems with).

Sorry, I assumed you were making a density argument, when I guess you were making a population argument. So you're saying that Los Angeles County can't do it because it has twice the population? Can only counties with Norway's population or lower do it?

The only reason you got away breaching Seven of Nine so far was because she's no longer part of the collective. But she's captain of the Enterprise now so you are probably in trouble.

I see these arguments a lot and they're kind of contradictory:

1. It won't work in the US because there's too many people in the US! Norway is a sparsely-populated country!

2. It won't work in the US because there's too few people in the US! The US is a sparsely populated country!

It's a dumb comparison because you can just take any given US state in isolation the same way you can take European countries in isolation. Norway is about the same size with the same population density as Utah, and like Utah has most of its population concentrated around one major city, and has about the same median income as Utah. (Norway is much richer in GDP per capita but the average joe actually buying a car makes about the same).

If Norway can do it then surely Utah can do it.

Gas was cheap and cars were cheap. Your car is a consumable commodity that you have to factor in to the cost of the drive too. Insurance companies are also moving toward mileage-based fee structures so if that's your situation it figures in to the cost as well. Furthermore you have to figure in the cost of your labor in operating the vehicle and if you value that more or less than sitting back and watching a movie or playing a game on your portable console/phone/laptop.

It doesn't have to be that way. In many places public transit works more like a Star Trek transporter. You go somewhere, go down some stairs, and come up another set of stairs in a distant place. It's not as fast but it's reasonably quick. The only problem is this kind of transit is alien to most parts of the US, and the few cities that do have it also don't manage their extremely mentally ill and/or criminal population.

The kind of transit you're thinking of is the only transit much of the US has built -- commuter transit. That kind of transit sucks and most people don't use it.

It's not *very* organic though, since the coal ash is what's left over after you've burned most of the carbon.

There's a lot of speculation about a rather prominent crypto developer who died very suspiciously shortly after Satoshi's farewell message.

lol I shouldn't post tired. Quick look on wikipedia informs that they did an occultation mapping for the asteroid with another star in September so they could be ready for a more detailed one now.

A really cool trick you can do when this happens is have various observers around the globe time the occlusion. This lets you build a really accurate image of the shape of the asteroid at the time. It's pretty neat.

What do you call the diesel and E85 pumps? And before that you had to make sure you pumped from the leaded/unleaded pumps.

Yeah the CONNECTOR isn't an issue but that doesn't mean the pump is compatible with your vehicle. (Though one actual connector incompatibility I can think of is that truck diesel nozzles are too large to fit in diesel passenger car ports)

It seems like a better solution would be to electrify segments of the route where it's easiest to, only needing the battery to cover the gaps, rather than trying to travel long distances on battery.

A bunch of the cost of a fully electric line is taken up by utility headaches in specific areas (far from supply, no place to build substation easily, etc.). If you just create a dense enough patchwork you would only need small batteries.

Depends. Some EPROMs last longer than others, and it can also depend on the voltage they were programmed at. I've seen plenty of EPROMs programmed 1980-1983 read/dump just fine.

I believe storage temperature has an effect as well.

...but my job is engineering principles. I'm a very principled engineer.

The obvious problem here is that buildings are primarily stores of value, like NFTs, rather than productive properties. Owners would rather stomach vacancies than admit that maybe the rental value has gone down (and thus potentially affect property value). Supply and demand is broken here.

With a steep vacancy tax, owners would actually be forced to rent out their properties at whatever rate matches demand.