And we don't have one. Or a Hitler. No matter how badly some people scream so.

Don't forget Curtis Mathes. Remember when they had their own high end stores?

Probably not for long. You may as well buy that no-name TV made in Vietnam now, because name brands have ceased to mean anything in this space. Just about everyone followed RCA and GE and Philco, who all stopped making sets in the 80's, and made all their TV money licensing their names to cheap Asian third parties. There hasn't been a real RCA TV since 1986.

Uh, it's both, and crime too.

Housing got expensive because California become like New York City: A place where the young want to be because its "the center of it all", which creates luxury pricing conditions for everything, not just housing. As packed as LA and the Bay Area have become, you're only going to get more apartments by seizing single family homes by eminent domain and tearing them down. That's not America, and even in California, that'll get you a fucking riot. Go on, try it and see.

You'd be closing the circle, then. Musk founded PayPal as "X.com" in 1999. He's still the single largest shareholder. So it wouldn't shock anyone.

Bullshit. You already have that in cities. People have a variety of choices. Every big city in the US has both bus and light rail systems with very few exceptions (Cincinnati, for one). EVERY city of medium size on up has a bus system. What you really want is to force your post title on people: no cars at all. Your whole aim has nothing to do with "choice".

Eliminating jobs that can be done automatically IS "real money on the table" to company shareholders. Will AI replace these jobs? You bet your ass they will. The West is not prepared for the impact AI is having on employment, and will continue to have for decades to come. Some people are burying their heads, but it won't save them. Entire fields that used to be good paying professional work are quickly becoming something a glorified script can handle with minimal input.

Some of us are kind of doing that already by running old OS's in VirtualBox, and then running old but useful abandonware for personal tasks on those OS's. It's pretty fun and there's an ocean of useful and interesting software out there.... especially from the 90's. You just have to be careful about where you get it from to avoid the malware aspect. But there are some reliable sites. And it's pretty fascinating using software that my dad used. We're definitely in a weird time.

Corporation? Our own government the last 5 years or so took the position that every kid should learn to code, because there was no future in things like, oh, honest manual work. AI has fucked the assumptions of everyone from the halls of Congress all the way to Silicon Valley.

What privacy do you have outside your walls? Let's assume you have a house for a second... if you do, then while your lawn is part of your property, and you can forbid others from trespassing, you can't forbid people from looking at it. Or at your doorway. Or your driveway. Unless you put up total privacy fencing, then everything outside your walls is legally accessible to eyes, both meat and electronic. And always has been. This is why city people have moved to the country for years. Because there your neighbors are raccoons and bobcats and snakes, and they don't care who comes to visit. City life has always been a surrender of privacy outside the walls of your domicile. That's the unavoidable consequence of packing people close together.

Oh fuck off. You're perpetually offended because Americans have things like big houses and big yards, and this grinds your gears. We won't eat the bug and we won't live in the pod. You want Canadians to live in Soviet worker housing pitched 30 stories high? That's your business. Stay out of ours.

I'm convinced Google is run by idiots. Look at ChromeOS Flex. With just a few tweaks, with the allowance of just a few desktop apps, Google would have a wide-open opportunity to make a serious run at Microsoft's home PC dominance because of the whole Windows 11 requirements issue. There are millions upon millions of perfectly good computers that are now going to landfills because of that, and they could all have Flex running on them if it wasn't for Google's short-sighted strategy. You can't even watch a DVD on Flex after Google shitcanned VideoLan from their approved apps list. They insist you use only Google stuff via the cloud. Such a damn wasted opportunity since Flex is easy to install and use otherwise, and a fairly pleasant user experience.

Remember "I will replace you with a very small shell script"?

We're essentially replacing people with a very big script now. But they are being replaced. The inevitable has arrived.

One of the problems we have though is that women won't do these kinds of physically demanding and dirty outdoor jobs (how many women do you see paving roads or picking up garbage or working at oil derricks?), so that automatically halves the labor supply for these jobs, and of the able bodied young men, most won't work at these jobs because they were raised to expect a comfortable indoor environment. Everyone wants a desk/cubicle. Most of these infrastructure jobs have solid pay. Or even better pay. Doesn't matter. Most young men now would rather live with less money than take such jobs. Raise the pay to 80 grand on these if you like. Won't matter. Most young men won't work a job where they're out digging in hot weather.