FWIW, many of us outside the US don't think of the US as a country manufacturing high quality goods. For those, you'd go to Germany, Switzerland, Japan, or Taiwan. Or even China. The US is the country where anything goes. Cars being one example - clunky, low quality, low tech/gas guzzling, poor to drive vehicles of enormous sizes. A US company optimizes for low production quality vs. warranty costs, it doesn't optimize for high quality and see warranties as a failure.

Now, having lived and worked in the US I know that this is only a part (the largest) of the story - you can get anything of any quality. But "Made in the US" is certainly not a positive stamp, even before your orange demi-god alienated the civilized part of the world.

You can argue that there is equilibrium right now - companies are selling and buying, it's just not at a price point consumers like. Thus we lower our demand.

You are considering the current AI tech as "... junk". Many others aren't, that's why there is a gold rush - many see the value, and that it keeps on improving. Fast. Others again just go for the gold rush. Personally, I see it as a very valuable tool in my arsenal. It's not the only one, but it's a good, multi-purpose one. And it definitely needs to be checked, but the good ones give you references you can and should check when providing information - and for coding, it gives you what you ask for. Which has finally led to improvements in one of my pet peeves - people are starting to provide better and testable requirements.

Is there a bubble? I think so. Will it pop? Yes, I think so - it will be reminiscent of the dot-com bubble. Many will go bust, and the world is changed by the remaining companies over time.

This is not like the crypto bubble, where the end value is 0.

Yeah.

They completely ignore panserpmia.

They just quote Isaac Asimov's writing from almost half a century ago (Europa). Ignores Enceladus, Titan, Venus, Mars; all of which have *BIOSIGNATURES* of a probability curve not too dissimilar to Europa.

They are likely a dilettante. Those folks do not do "prior art" research because they believe in the Auteur Myth.

  "An auteur is a filmmaker whose personal style and thematic focus are so distinctive that they are considered the 'author' of their films, a concept known as the auteur myth."

Real science isn't that. Real science is a rational discipline. The null hypothesis -- know what that means. Prior art -- know what that means. Mental biases -- know those, too; you'll see what you want to see, hear what you want to hear. Science is the discipline of mind that ensures you're not just spewing random nonsense. You verify what you think; that's the discipline.

As Isaac Newton said ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ), "nani gigantum humeris insidentes."

Ignore them.

Everything seems obvious once it is explained.

Why do 12-14 steps of algebra, when calculus works in 2?

Obvious. People should know calculus.

Yet they don't.

Define Green's Theorem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... -- is obvious.

Everything is obvious *IN HINDSIGHT*.

Doesn't the bill of rights restrict the government, rather than businesses or individuals? Thus, regulations on this kind of surveillance / stalking needs separate legislation - like the European GDPR. In lack thereof, the separate question is whether law enforcement can buy information they're not legally allowed to create themselves.

Well, yes. For many years, presidential candidates, both Democratic and Republican, referred to the United States as "the indispensible nation". And my reaction was always, "Doesn't that mean the US is a single point of failure for civilization?"

We are currently performing an experiment which addresses this question: can the US enjoy the benefits of soft power without the cost? That's the whole point of obeying *norms*. No individual force is going to punish you if you are treacherous, mercurial, foul-mouthed, disrespectful and generally unpredictable. Everyone will punish you.

I think an inevitable cost of this experiment will be that the world will decide that the US can't be a single point of failure for global democracy any longer. In many ways, that's something that will be good for us. But it's also going to cost us in painful ways. When the world decides to move away from the dollar as the international reserve currency, you will see both inflation and higher interest rates on everything from credit cards to mortgages, to business loans that will offset the export advantages. We will need *more* business investment to shift the economy to producing low value goods again, so the transition will be rocky.

Most of the world is not Northern Canada, which must be where they got that number from. Maine averages 4.55 peak sun hours per day, and is the northereasternmost state in the continental United States. Even Washington state is at 3.95.

Solar panels: The roof of a trailer is about 450 square feet. In the northeastern U.S., you would average only 3.5 hours of full sun, so you'd get only a little over 13 kW per day.

So the solar generation function of a panel is no sun, no power, partial sun, no power, peak sun hours, full power.

Well, I guess that you're the expert.

So in an entire day, covering the entire roof of a trailer with solar panels would add a whopping 7 miles of range

Maybe that's enough to get you over a time zone or so so that you get an extra hour of "full sun"? ;)

After all, it's not like trailers are ever sitting idle during loading, unloading, or waiting for loads. Always moving, doncha know.

Once and for all people: "it's" (with an apostrophe) is a contraction of "it is." "its" is the possessive pronoun, which was intended here.

Yes, it is. Now think of the rule for possessives with every other type of noun (ordinary and proper) - " 's ". It's like the "i" before "e" except after "c" (and sometimes "y") rule, irregular verbs, and a host of other landmines in writing down the English language.

It doesn't help that there's a group of people actively miseducating kids about pronouns and demonizing references to them. His, hers, its, yours, theirs, and ours are all bricks paving the shoulder of the road to hell.

It's a trade off: you get abundant free energy to run the server, with extreme constraints on cooling because your server is running in the most perfect Thermos bottle ever.

Others are taking the opposite tack: undersea data centers for abundant free cooling at the expense of having to get the power down to your servers.

If had to bet on which one is more practial, I'd go with undersea servers. Build them off the coast of Chile, run cables out from batery-backed solar plants in the Atacama desert.

So embarrassed by the crap that you have to make up that you're posting AC? What are these free business loans only "illegals" qualify for, and where can I apply? Yo quiero links!

How does a society treat its citizens, specifically parents and children?

Autism -- is human psychology being maladaptive because of this situation. Parents aren't there for their children to imprint-upon. The psychological distress is real. Depersonalization is a result.

This depersonalization happening during acute childhood development phases, exacerbates the problem of social disengagement.

People should be treated as people, not chattel.

Hard to say. When comparing the deaths from covid in the US and Norway per capita, there are approximately 890 k extra deaths in the US. That's obviously not all Trump, though. Norway has a much better health care system, and a much smaller percentage of idiots. And while the latter obviously caused Trump, it's not set in stone that the latter caused the increased mortality in the former by making them refuse vaccines, ignore mask mandates etc. There's more correlation than causation here.

Also, here's a rare gem - Trump did something good with operation Warp Speed.

I think it may be evidence that Amazon has a shitty corporate culture that squeezes every penny it can out its employees.

Corruption can happen anywhere, but it's more likely to happen in totalitarian cultures where people feel like the system is rigged anyway. That's why countries like Russia and China have corruption problems. But I suspect the same feelings of me vs. the system occur in a capitalist enterprise like Amazon where employees are governed by dystopian, rigid, computerized metrics.