True, except that gold's actual usage price -- for industry and jewelry -- hasn't been its trading price for a very long time. As long as people have viewed it as a store of wealth its price has been inflated by that perception.

The language part, true. The problem is dependencies. Any time you upgrade, especially if you're jumping a large number of versions, you're going to have packages your code uses needing upgrades too. Those package upgrades will usually require code changes to accommodate. Some of those changes will require refactoring to handle structural changes needed for things to work right. That is usually where you end up down a rabbit-hole.

I'd prioritize updating Java 8 applications to Java 11 first. Those are going to be the hardest to bring up-to-date with Java 25 (latest LTS), bringing them up to Java 11 buys the most time. Then upgrade to Java 25 starting with Java 17 applications, then Java 21, then Java 11.

Remember that Java 25 will end support in 2033, so plan on starting your upgrade from Java 25 to the next LTS version basically as soon as your last upgrades to Java 25 are done.

Failing that, stroke something else.

Yes. The construction jobs are very short-term, and once built the data centers bring huge costs (financial and otherwise) while contributing only a handful of permanent jobs. Remember, these are lights-out hands-off facilities. They'll employ a handful of security guards and maintenance workers, the rest will all be handled remotely from Malaysia or the like.

Working from home is an alternative, one that we should use more.

(Of course, I WFH full time and have for 20 of the last 30 years, so I have a bit of a bias.)

You do know that Musk doesn't actually have a trillion dollars in *money*, right? He doesn't have anywhere remotely close to that much money. His total liquid assets are extensive, sure, maybe as much as a few billion, but nearly all of his incredible net worth isn't money. You could probably call it "potential money".

And everyone should keep in mind that this is true for basically all of the billionaires. Not that there isn't real wealth there, but it's a lot fuzzier than the numbers appear. Basically everyone with astronomical wealth mostly owns shares in companies, and how much of that value is real in any near-term sense depends on a lot of factors.

Musk's wealth is more speculative and fuzzy than most because his companies' valuation is based not on the revenues the companies generate now but theories about what they might generate in the future. Tesla's high valuation is all about the promise of self-driving cars restructuring transportation. SpaceX's is a little bit about cheap access to space changing a lot of stuff and more about AI. In all cases the high valuations are bets on world-changing technology being becoming real, and on Musk's companies being able to capture a good chunk of the resulting revenues.

That analysis is utterly wrong. Far, far worse than the smartphone theory.

It is, in fact, the almost exact opposite of the truth. The truth is that wealth is what causes fertility decline. Wealth and female education, actually, which come hand-in-hand. This story is strikingly visible everywhere around the globe. As a population becomes wealthier and its women become better-educated, fertility falls. Without exception, and the effect is so powerful it overrides culture, religion, everything.

This is the primary driver in the US, too. In fact, wages have not stagnated, not when you look at the full picture including government transfers, and every generation is wealthier than the one before. Somewhat surprisingly, given the current housing price bubble, each generation even has higher home ownership rates than the previous generations at the same ages. Houses and apartments are also significantly bigger and more luxurious (which explains most of their higher prices, actually; do some comparisons on a per square foot basis over time, then adjust for the higher quality and greater amenities we have today).

But if you look at how Americans spend their money over the years, the biggest change you'll find is that we spend less on housing, food and clothing as a percentage of our income (in spite of bigger, nicer houses, far more restaurant and delivered food, and much larger wardrobes) and much more on entertainment -- and that in spite of the fact that entertainment has gotten dramatically cheaper.

The US solved this problem 150 years ago. First with the observation that immigrants acculturate. Second with the acceptance that elements of their culture are going to get melded in to form a new culture. Culture is never static, anyway, it always drifts and morphs. Immigration just changes it a bit faster. But it's good! This ongoing immigrant-driven culture change is what made the US a superpower. Embrace it.

However, immigration is only a stopgap solution to the problem of population decline, because fertility is declining everywhere on the globe, fast. The global fertility rate is basically at replacement now, but the decline is continuing, and accelerating. We'll drop below replacement as a species in just a few years. Even then population will keep growing for a while due to the "filling out" effect, but then it'll start dropping, fast. And it will quickly become top-heavy (more old than young).

Probably not just our economic system, our civilization as a whole, though AI may change that. A highly technological civilization depends on having a large population because it depends on a vast amount of knowledge, which requires a tremendous amount of specialization. Some of this is the obvious sort, such as the scientists and engineers who are focused on increasingly-narrow areas of expertise, but a lot of it is not at all obvious, especially in industry, where everything we make requires a huge amount of knowledge that was learned by doing and isn't -- and maybe can't be -- taught anywhere but on the job.

To some extent we could probably manage with a smaller population if more of the population became highly educated (not necessarily in the academic sense, though we'd need that, too), but that transition wouldn't be easy, in part because there are lots of people who simply aren't interested in highly-technical work. We'd need a lot more of them to become willing to learn and do it anyway. Obviously the first step would be to bring the whole remaining population up to what the developed world considers a basic level of education -- that would enable us to tap new supplies of scientists, engineers and technicians. But the population reduction that seems likely to come means we'd need a lot more than that to be able to maintain our knowledge base and production diversity.

AI might change all this, of course. It could make it completely unnecessary for humans to participate in any of the above. But without something like that, it seems unlikely that our technological civilization could survive with less than a billion people or so, and technological progress would likely take a severe hit long before we hit that level of population reduction.

Even that isn't true. The correct statement is that it's a crime to falsely shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater in circumstances where doing so is reasonably likely to incite a panic that would cause death or injury.

If you shouted "Fire!" in an American theater today, odds are that everyone would just ignore you, and a reasonable person would expect that to be the outcome. That's because fires in modern theaters are (1) quite rare, (2) much more likely to be announced by an alarm and (3) not difficult to escape safely due to the plethora of clearly-marked exit routes that are required by law. So everyone knows that in the event of a fire trampling people in an effort to escape is not necessary for self-preservation, that calmly walking to the nearest exit is better.

It's worth noting that the truth or falsity of the shout isn't really even much of a factor in the legal question. What matters is whether a reasonable person would expect that the shout would be likely to cause unnecessary death or injury as opposed to not shouting. The original Schenk v. United States case opinion in which Holmes used "Fire in a crowded theater" as an example, did argue that truth was an absolute shield, but later rulings, especially the 1969 case that overturned Schenk, removed that protection. If you shout intending to cause real physical harm and expecting that to be the result of your action it's a crime, even if what you shouted was true.

The number of accidents you have depends far more on how you drive than how fast you react. If you and Claude are correct about AVs having slower reaction times that just highlights the importance of driving style over reaction time, because AVs have fewer and less severe accidents than human drivers.

The main thing you can do -- and AV systems do, generally -- is leave yourself more space and therefore time to react, which includes driving slower in areas where sudden incursions into the roadway are likely.

That said, I expect AVs to react faster as their systems improve. All of our AI is excessively compute-heavy right now, but we know that isn't essential because our brains do more with less in spite of the fact that our wetware runs on a significantly inferior substrate. As we learn how to build more efficient AI systems, that should reduce AV compute requirements and make it feasible for them to "think faster", and therefore react faster.

The one thing that is clear is that AVs will continue improving on their already better-than-human safety records.

True up to a point, and governments are past that point. They can in fact tell companies what formats the government will accept and generate and companies can't afford to just ignore that. And that's actually the first step towards sovereignty: dictate formats that aren't controlled by hostile entities. So, start by declaring the ODF formats the official government standard formats. You'll accept documents in other formats, but you can't guarantee they'll be correctly rendered on your end and you won't put any effort into trying to clean up Word and other non-standard format documents. If they're bad or unreadable or whatever, they'll be rejected and it's on the sender to fix the problem. When you send documents you'll only send them in ODF format, no others, and it's on the receiver to be able to read them.

Internally you standardize on something like LibreOffice that natively handles ODF formats. Anyone else can use anything they want as long as it can handle ODF. Word, BTW, actually does a decent job of handling ODF. Inertia may be a thing, but remember that governments have a lot more mass behind them than private companies. If the government insists and won't budge, any company that needs to do business with the government will slowly come around.

Hmm. Just from my own bullshit experience, if you find yourself in an empty room, you probably look to the right and then, naturally, you're moving counterclockwise.