THIS!

Been in the Capital Expenditure Management business for a while Iv'e watched the Southern California office market completely retract and try to reinvent itself into usually residential with little success. I can only imagine all the brokers baiting property owners with data centers, not realizing the practicality of upgrading power, water and fire life safety to data center requirements is impossible for anything less than $300/SF

I think there is some merit to your generalization. I am guilty, not an avid reader but have listened to quite a few audio books, I even bought a few shelf trophies. There was a point I had a 2.5hr commute which I loathed until finding a few amazing audio books. Yes I was driving but my imagination existing in the world created by the author. I can't say I would have read(listened) to as many books without this option. Shoot I pick up my kids and they literally are like what did we miss.

I admit I do not like dramatizations, just a someone reading the unedited words.

Not normally a conspiracy theorist. First block chain (wont even go into the obscure inventor bit) becomes a thing requiring massive amounts of GPU computing power, to the extent where it was impossible to purchase a GPU to do GPU things. Now AI is a thing, even more so requiring GPUs to do not so much GPU things. Is there a secret world order which needs this massive pattern recognition global infrastructure for some ...... SIGNAL LOST

^this!!

critical driveline software should be separate and autonomous from accessories. My ID.4 which I love but admittedly does not have the smoothest accessory software used to crash the heads-up display and with it the air conditioning system. So, while driving in summer rush hour hear I am performing a hard boot on the system swearing my but off.

Playing devils advocate we have a slew of users who want to be able to drive there car with there iphones.

TT-RSS install on my cloud server, web browser and android clients. Use it for everything I can. It vastly simplifies keeping up with news/ events/authors/sites I want to follow without having to visit dozens of sites daily. I've over 100 feeds I track, not counting the YouTube channels. On some I find articles to read daily, some weekly, some rarely. For example, I followed a link in my Slashdot feed to this story. I'd not have seen it if it wasn't in my feed.

Really? Now that would be an achievement.
Between the AI crud that's remarkably inaccurate and the litany of sponsored links, it's hard to get Google to return results of value anymore.
Perplexity (mentioned in systemd-anonymousd' comment) is one good alternative. Here's another (IMHO):
https://www.startpage.com/
Useful Google results without the crud.

Keep in mind if you purchased an EV between '21 and '24 you probably got some level of free charging. pre 2024 ID.4 came with three years of fast charging. I think a large part of this group falls within this catagory.

Back in '98 we used the standalone server as a workplace chat app for a tech support department. It worked great, especially since we were always on the phone you could still chat with a coworker. The server wasn't well supported and had a memory leak which lead to the NT Server crashing and killing the entire tech support departments MS Access database. Boss wasn't happy, but had to take the hit since he gave into our request to install. It was fun while it lasted.

LOL!
Oh, to have mod points...

I am a construction project manager who does a significant amount of commercial realestate projects. It has been interesting seeing how different company cultures react to this ideoological shift. Firms with younger manangment treat it as an apportunity to addapt firms with older manangement basically freeze and wait for the news everyone is going back to work. You watch demand to return after demand to return and the offices are still empty.

Developers are pivoting to biomedical and multifamily .... they are desperate. We here strories of downtown los angeles mega building owners giving up buildings. My position is these are company cultures who froze hoping for things to return to the status quo. This will certainly play out. Gone are the days of setting up a cubicle home and having personal spaces.

This is true, however I think the interpretation is incorrect. Inflation is an equation which will balance itself one way or another. Without fed intervention then the cost of bread drives up to $20 a loaf.

Sheldon? is that you ?

This is not correct. Adaptive Reuse of buildings is done all the time. Downtown LA used to be all commercial up through the mid 2000s. Adaptive reuse of old garment industry buildings revitilized downtown, keeping in mind the california seizmic requirements. There just has to be a motivating factor (see profit). I know in California the main issue has just been strict beurocracy that just makes things close to impossible.

...that the decline in productivity and the forced return to work in office environments are somehow related?

Same progression here, though I was a bit older.

Started with Trash-80s in High School. Networked off of a cassette tape player. Finally got my own IIe when I was a Senior and the school switched to them. The IIe carried me through college, until I was able to get a blistering fast 286 once I had a real job & income. How far we've come.