Two economists were walking down the street when they saw dog poop on the sidewalk.

The first economist said to the second, "I'll pay you $100 to eat a spoonful of that dog poop."

The second economist figured it was an easy $100, so ate a spoonful of poop. Then he said to the first, "I'll pay you $100 to eat a spoonful."

The first economist ate a spoonful and collected his $100.

As they walked further down the street, the second economist said to the first, "We both ate dog poop for nothing."

The first economist replied, "Not true. We just added $200 to the GDP."

Yes. Much Cobol code was written before structured programming was standard. There are no unit tests. There are no classes to encapsulate complexity.

No, not really. A programmer can learn Cobol well enough to get work done in about a week. The problem isn't "learning the language", but learning about the legacy application you need to maintain. For instance, why is a discount applied to every invoice for customer #478324? Well, because he was the CEO's college roommate, but you won't learn that from the manual.

Only if you want to be pedantic.

There's been a lot of progress in programming languages in the last 60 years.

It is broke.

The bubble will burst because of a failure to monetize, not a failure of the underlying technology.

People are using AI for free. Why will they start paying hundreds of billions for it?

It was the same in the Dotcom crash. Pets.com had a failed business model, but the Internet didn't go away.

No. That would explain a general lack of new car sales, but that's not what's happening. It is only EV sales that are stagnating. People are still buying gas cars.

EV sales are booming in China. A big reason is much lower prices. In China, EVs are cheaper than equivalent ICE cars. That is also true in Southeast Asia, which imports EVs from China. But the West restricts EV imports, so the prices are much higher.

The site is hundreds of miles from the Cascadia fault line.

There is a major mountain range (the Cascades) and many miles of desert between the site and the coast.

Recording video is not illegal.

Recording audio IS illegal in California without the consent of all parties.

Since Meta glasses record audio by default, he likely broke the law.

Indeed. I can think of zero reasons to go to a physical bookstore to download an e-book.

The reason they expect seems to be "because you hate Amazon", but unfortunately, I don't hate Amazon. I'm a mostly happy customer.

Indeed. Expecting robot manufacturers to buy their software is silly.

Robots are designed with SW and HW closely coupled. No one is gonna design dexterous robot hands that can crack eggs and change diapers, and then, at the very end, go looking for software to make it work. That's absurd.

The biggest risk is that they don't exist yet.

What is an AP1200?

If you mean AP1000 , those take twenty years to build and cost 300% of the initial estimate.

What special snowflake needs does Birmingham have that makes it any different from the hundreds of other cities running off-the-shelf solutions?

Contractee: "We insist on a fixed price contract."
Contactor: "No problem. We agree."

One month later:

Contractee: "We need to make some small changes to the spec."
Contractor: "That's gonna cost ya."

You are confusing cause and effect. These projects are designed to fail, because failure is where the profit is.

They've been caught paying kickbacks for contracts.

That's how Gray Davis lost his job.

Larry didn't make $400B by being generous.

If you don't know how to do X, then how do you know who are "the right people" to do X?

Were any of the users actually paid what they were promised?

Were any users paid anything?