Also, we're not a "homogeneous population", you can stop with your pro-racism stereotypes. Immigrants are 20% of our population.

Being big is an advantage, not a disadvantage. It means that the costs to develop a system are spread across a much larger population. Everything we have had to be developed on a comparably minuscule budget.

And I want to be clear in the above: I fully acknowledge the irony, in that the US tech industry has been a powerhouse. There seems to be a massive disconnect in the US between tech innovation and tech infrastructure. The US is a world-leader in the former. It's consistently a deep laggard on the latter. The reasons why the US has so much trouble getting its act together on infrastructure and systems are complex, but it is remarkable to see, as someone who has spent their life in a mix of the US and Iceland. And it's not just Iceland that has it's act together on these sort of things - it's most of the developed world, and even surprising amounts of the developing world.

, with the most sophisticated banking system

Any American who believes this should try living overseas for a year or two. The US banking system is insanely backwards. Numerous aspects of the US medical and government systems as well. It's hard to explain it to you unless you experience it.

Checks are just one symptom (in Iceland, 15 years ago bank tellers would look at you weird and have to get the manager if you had a personal check, and 10 years ago, stopped taking them altogether). For like 15-20 years, we've had free instant bank-to-bank money transfers (no third party involved), everyone on the same service, to the point that if someone is collecting money for a gift for a coworker's birthday, it's always been, they just send an email with their bank details, instead of going around and collecting cash. All your bills - all of them - just show up in your bank's inbox. On and on.

I mentioned the medical system. Let me give a random example. In the US, you go to a doctor and they determine you need a prescription. They or their receptionist have to ask what pharmacy you want it at. It gets routed through SecureScripts (before that, it was all phone based!), and depending, you may also need to also call into the pharmacy before you go there - and if you need it "transferred", it's a multihour process. Here? The doctor just jots it into their computer, that's it. You can literally just walk out of the doctor's office into the pharmacy next door (or any other pharmacy), tell them your name, and they go grab your order.

Everything is connected. Everything is interoperable. All keyed to your kennitala (ID number) . And the kennitala is only a key, not a password. The fact that a SSN in the US is treated as both a key and a password is insane, from a security standpoint; by contrast, you can just post your kennitala online, it's fine. We have multiple actual authentication methods. The most convenient is the Auðkenni system. Our SIM cards store credentials in a separate cryptographic chip. When we need 2FA, for any business or government agency (all on the same system), it sends a special SMS that the phone routes to the SIM card to process, and then (at the OS level) pops up an authentication dialogue, so we have universal 2FA, linked to our kennitala, in all of our phones. It's been this way for like 15+ years.

Or let's talk taxes. You all know what it's like in America, so let's explain what it's like in Iceland. I get an email letting me know it's tax time. I go to the tax office website. I get 2FA login via my phone. My tax forms are right there. They're already filled out, with all of the information already collected. For like 90% of the population, it's just click through, verify it's correct, and submit. Some people may have some things that weren't logged, such as overseas investments or whatnot, but for most people, it's like a five minute process.

On and on. It's been so weird seeing America getting things 1-2 decades after us and acting like, "wow, we're leading in banking technology!", etc. No, you're an aged dinosaur, way behind the rest of the world because none of your systems work together and you're so slow to adapt to change.

You can generally tell when the true operational cost, including cost of capital, significantly exceeds employee cost by looking at whether they pay people to work in the middle of the night.

There are quite a lot of places where that happens. Just using the OP's list:

Airplanes: there are fewer flights at night, but that's when a lot of required maintenance happens. The Internet tells me the average lease on a Boeing 737 is around a few hundred thousand USD per month. Bigger planes would have even bigger differentials with their crew salaries.

Machinists: there's a reason you picked this example. Really expensive machine tools can run into the multiple millions though, plus maintenance and consumables. Lease rates can easily go into double digit thousands per month. And that's not even considering exotic stuff. Lots of high end shops operate around the clock.

Radiologists: Most of the operating costs for big medical imaging equipment are going to exceed the employee operating it, though maybe not the radiologist. Getting a radiologist to work outside regular business (or banking) hours is a chore, but the techs do so routinely. Sometimes the actual operation is the expensive bit so no night shifts, like anything involving a SQUID.

Tower cranes: don't work as much at night probably due to safety, but lease rates mostly in the double digit thousands a month and up.

Trading analysts: Bloomberg terminals are a few tens of thousands per year, so no. Some of the crazy HFT stuff probably does cost ridiculous amounts though, so maybe the quants writing algorithms for it rather than the traders.

Garbage men: maybe. Probably yes if you count the salary of one guy, no if two.

Concrete truck drivers: probably. Also probably semi trucks.

MWh is a unit of capacity

The word you're looking for is "energy."

"Capacity" can have pretty much any units depending on what you're talking about. Generation capacity, for example, is usually measured in Watts. It's common to talk about battery capacity in terms of power because if it can't provide enough power it's no good at all, and then time; i.e. make it work, then make it good.

The Internet tells me that California is a mythical place invented to tempt children into windowless vans and teenagers into dressing in black and giving money to poor people. Just like the Internet told me the things the GP said.

I don't think "continuous" means what you think it means. The reason you can do this is because the models are continuous.

"JaiLIP" is just running gradient descent on the input until you get the effect on the output you want. The same thing works just fine on our brains except it's less efficient because we can't (yet) differentiate over our output. We call them "optical illusions" even though they don't have anything to do with actual optics.

What are letters? Books are just splotches of dark ink on light paper.

we could get Congress

This is what the OP was talking about. YOU, collectively as the voters, are in charge. You've been brainwashed very deliberately to think you're not, but also yay USA democracy freedom bestest fuk ya, and then that learned helplessness has been used to exploit some foundational weaknesses in your system.

and the average citizen

You have also been deliberately made dumber by being convinced education is bad and should be expensive, and wedged and distracted by irrelevant garbage.

"The government you elect is the government you deserve." By none other than your own Thomas Jefferson.

Both ways!

Sure they want updated engines. That dosen't mean that, lacking new engines, they don't want the planes they have. Not having any A380s at all would be a pretty big problem for most of the airlines that fly it.

The A350 1000, or the 777x, have a little more than half the capacity of an A380. That's twice as many flights.

The uses for bitcoin seem to mostly decrease as it becomes more popular. It's great for sending money around without paying taxes or getting the attention that taking a briefcase full of bills through the airport gets... until bitcoin gets popular enough that governments recognize it as a briefcase full of cash.

In hindsight, it's fairly obvious. When you get tired of arguing with your employees what do you do? Hire someone else to do it for you. Then when you get tired of arguing with them, you hire another layer to do it for you. Et cetera.

That's the magic of the loop. The agent tells you it's doing everything perfectly.