I would say that any kind of substantial level of investment in a jurisdiction is a reasonable indicator of an expectation of a return on investment, and thus confidence in the economic growth of at least some industries in that jurisdiction. I'm not sure why people are trying to hand wave away that kind of an indicator, unless the fact of it creates some problem for some narrative they have bought into, creating a level of cognitive dissonance necessitating peculiar denials.

Seems like a problem you could fix overnight with guaranteed national minimum wage, worker's employment rights, and opening up immigration to regain the trust of those people you shot, killed, kidnapped and ripped their children away from.

Who the fuck would CHOOSE to go work in the US at the moment?

At that point decent emergency healthcare in remote locations like the upper Andes, remote mining camps, container ships, and antarctic research stations becomes possible. Parachute the robot surgeon in to the site, set up the mobile operating theater, and carve away. For that matter, it would make sense to send one along on lunar and deep space missions, both as surgeons and general fetch-and-steps.

Worried about the news cycle moving on from AI, are we guys? Realising that's achievements are vastly outweighed by its costs still, and desperate for a use-case, much like IBM were in the Watson days when they literally had to ask people to suggest things it could do for them because they're run out of things that it could actually do?

Yeah, keep trying. Keep pretending that it's conscious or real intelligence or "looks like a human brain". Because someone's gotta pay those trillions back and you don't want it to be you, right?

Put it this way:

I've stopped bothering to see whether my ~2000 games on Steam are "Linux-compatible" on a standard Ubuntu install.

I've also supplemented my entirely-Linux network with a Linux gaming laptop onto which I've put... all my old favourite Windows freeware.

Last night something reminded me and I wanted to play WH40K:Space Marine. Double-click. Install. Play.

A few weeks prior, my daughter was talking about RDR2. Double-click. Install. Play.

I brought across my Wreckfest too. Double-click. Install. Play.

My default photo viewer is not the trash that it's in Ubuntu by default but my old favourite of Irfanview.

I even went to the effort of downloading all my old GOG games and installing them (no, not all of them are DOSBox, there are many old Windows games in there), and even got Castle of the Winds (a very old 16-bit Windows 3.1 game that doesn't even run in modern Windows) working by just substituting the Ubuntu 32/64-bit only install of Wine with the stock Wine from the Wine website.

It's not perfect, but you know what? It's so damn close that you can just think "Hey, this just needs an update" whenever you encounter something unusual that you want to run.

Wine is good. Proton is AMAZING. And it only ever trips up on pathetic stuff - like things that have deep ActiveX/IE integration (e.g. OrcaSlicer variants produced exclusively for FlashForge do that to load the proprietary camera view... fortunately OrcaSlicer itself is open-source, and the camera view is not important at all, and there are other ways to access it)

I wonder if it can "reason" out the number of Rs in strawberry or whatever other trivial reasoning task it hasn't been trained on an exact example of.

I had a friend who knew both Spanish and French. She decided to take up Portuguese because it was similar to both. At one point she got so confused she couldn't use any of the three!

The problem is that you're focusing on the tech and - over time - you WILL lose track and get tired of the tech, because it happens to literally everyone. I'm extremly techy. But there are some things that are entirely in the realm of tech where I think "Oh, come on, this is nonsense, why can't I just do it the old way?!" (e.g. systemd, which I find to be the universal bane of anything I want to achieve).

That will come to us all. We're already doing it. Why do I have to ID myself to access this website? Why do I have to jump through MFA hoops just to sign in to my email? etc. etc. etc. All with good intention, good reason, and with purpose, but increasingly we, the users, will get frustrated with it all while the 20-somethings will just treat it as normal because they grew up doing it, and then get frustrated with whatever comes after when they are 50-somethings.

The tech is not the problem here. The problem here is sheer, utter, idiocy. Maybe in the form of someone far outside the normal mental bounds being solely in control of their finances (for example), but idiocy nonetheless.

And the cure isn't tech-training. The cure is "being a suspicious / paranoid bastard". I'm a suspicious / paranoid bastard. Good luck trying to scam me because even when there are legitimate processes, I am happy to just stop and say "Nope. I'm not going to do that." Look at the nonsense in your posts and the OP - buying Amazon gift cards, buying gold and giving it to a courier, etc. etc. etc.

It doesn't matter how sweet-talking someone is... I ain't gonna do that. Letting people take over my computer remotely? I don't even let people I know and love TOUCH my computer (and they know that). Nobody touches my computer. Nobody logs into it but me. Nobody knows that password. And no, even my kid, doesn't get to "just browse" on it, nor on my phone. I have other devices if they want to do that.

Scam-prevention isn't about learning the latest tech and keeping up to the date, it's about being an entirely suspicious bastard about everything. It's why my dad distrusts electronic transactions. He'll do them but you know what he does? He gets me or my brother to CHECK first. Others in my family have been scammed - credit card cloning in restaurants (good, luck, that card doesn't leave my sight... and, yes, I've had that argument with restaurants and pubs... card reader behind the bar? Okay, then bring it here? No? Then I come there? No... oh look you CAN do it in front of me but you just didn't want to...), mum accidentally signed up to a new electricity company on the doorstep (but UK contract regulations mean we shut that down once we heard about it), I've had a guy at my door trying to insert a key into a pre-pay electric meter in my house who said - explicitly - that he was "from your electricity supplier". He wasn't. He was from a rival, committing fraud on my doorstep, trying to force me to switch supplier to him without me noticing. And me, being the suspicious bastard, refused to let him do so, and warned the rest of the street (the police came along eventually, shut them down, and asked for evidence, but I didn't have any CCTV recording audio near the porch or I would have nailed him to the wall). He looked all official in his little hi-vis, and they were blanketing the whole street the same way... and people fell for it.

My dad REGULARLY asks me if "that was you on the texting again the other night" - because he gets texts with the "Hi Dad, I lost my phone and have no money...." He never responds but he always checks in with me afterwards just to make sure. And I think him realising how often it's NOT ME makes it clear just how widespread scams are so he's even more suspicious.

We just need to teach people to be suspicious and make official processes official enough that they are NOT suspicious. This requires absolutely no fancy tech or tech-training at all.

It just needs people to think "What the fuck am I doing buying Amazon gift cards to pay my tax bill?"

Still trying to extort money from IBM after all this time. Nothing like a business model made up entirely of rent seeking.

Everyone caught onto the fact that it's nonsense that's nothing to do with AI.

A lot, if not most, gold trades never involve metals physically changing hands, any more than stock trades involve you handing over paper certificates. Generally if you're a large buyer you purchase the gold from an exchange and it sits in their vault where the neighborhood meth head can't get to it.

"I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. "
      -Gen. Smedley Butler, 1933

A lot of American wars are at the behest of resource-seeking corporations. National forces are brought out when corporate enforcers are inadequate or expensive. I thought all this got very obvious, too, when "Blackwater" was so much in the news during Iraq, and the legal need to give them the same immunity to every Iraqi law that American national troops enjoyed.