You forgot:

Democracy sausages!

Yes at nearly every polling location there will be some organisation (many charity led) with volunteer staff sizzling sausages and onions on the BBQ, offering food and drinks (soda, water, no beer though) at cheap prices.

Normally located within walking distance in any but the most remote locations, it's a fairly quick outing to get your name checked off the roll, take your voting papers, (optionally) vote, and then stick your papers into the appropriate slots.

Not only do you get a very large turn-out, the results give actual numbers on disillusion with all offered parties rather than simply counting those that didn't vote for whatever reason - including inability to get their vote submitted.

I don't care about some basic utilities and whether they run on Linux - there's a damn good chance an alternative is available that runs perfectly. I had a quick run through our licensed software based on minimum annual cost >$100k and the only ones that will run on Linux are because they've already migrated to SaaS.

The only way is through risk to profits, so power plants must be owned by the parent company, no spinning off into a $2 bucket company at any time so when SHTF so there's no assets to cover rectification, and the power plant must be situated next to the DC, so there's risk that the DC is damaged/destroyed/off-lined if the plant also has a problem. Probably want to stick in some KPIs on meeting government audits and regulations as well, rather than making your bonus purely based on profits.

Oh, and for events where there's not enough generation, AI DCs should be forced into stand by rather than residential black outs.

I also had COVID twice and also had some weird mental reactions. For week or so after the second time it was like I was living in 3rd person view rather than the normal 1st person. Glad that's over, it was really weird doing certain things like driving and cooking.

Our state government has a policy on document formats to be used:

Not a bad effort IMO, and potentially a reason why GP send in via ODT format.

We had the same in Australia, except our wholesale power prices are starting to come down. Resisted all the way by conservatives of course, and with some of those still controlling some states the greening process has been slowed a fair bit - previously approved wind farms no longer approved, stopping government backed residential storage and associated virtual power plants - that kind of thing.

Interestingly for this article, SMRs were a point of contention at the last federal election, even though the cost is a multiple of that required for renewables. Thankfully the conservatives lost that round and hopefully the next, which should set Australia up for demonstrating that renewables leads to lower power prices.

I don't think it's anywhere clear when this inflection will occur, as it probably requires a leap in general AI that the current LLM based tools aren't geared towards. Currently it's just "the vibe" or gut feeling that things are accelerating towards the crunch, as we see things like:
* fully automated dark factories
* humanoid shaped robots for consumer sales
* continuing home automation and IoT 'gadgets' that are providing visual and more awareness of the home and surrounds and increasing capability to manage same
* wearable IoT - all that stuff.

In previous technological uplifts we've seen urbanisation as farm workers shifted into cities and became factory workers, factory workers shifting into service and technology workers, but where do technology workers go? There's a discernable reduction in graduate positions as companies hollow out IT teams and want experienced staff that can hit the ground running immediately. Sorry for the ramble.

Every couple of years I float the option of converting work PCs from windows to linux, just to see how it would go. Usually it's a shoe-in for retaining Windows because of application compatibility.
This year it's no longer so cut and dried - the prevalence of SaaS via web browser, remote desktop access to Windows Servers, plus AWS Appstream, all reduce the reliance on Windows on the desktop such that the only real sticking point is MS Office productivity - Outlook and Excel in particular.
It'll be interesting to see what the next review shows in 2028.

Meanwhile back at home, my kids gaming desktops are running Bazzite though Steam OS could be a better option for those devices, I've just installed Cachy OS as dual boot on my gaming PC, the Plex server will be next to be converted off windows. The gaming/media PC on the TV will be the last to go, as it triple times as resume editor with Word, and needs a lot more attention.

This IMO is the crux of the problem - you pay a one-off price to buy what you think is a perpetual licence to a game, only to have the publisher stop supporting the ability for you to run the game at a later date.

Hope this is the core of the issue at hand as a perpetual licence should not require manufacturer support to enable the product at a later date - I should be able to install the product on a different device and be able to get it working.

The thing with the big Chinese brands is that they've been making cars for decades for local consumption, with no notable exports until recently, eg: GAC, Geely, BYD. They've also added numerous sub-brands more recently for different markets, which makes it difficult to work out just who is owned by what parent, plus of course the other brands they've bought out (eg: Volvo/Polestar and MG). At this time I wouldn't want to make a call on reliability of these cars simply due to the lack of data for these in western nations. That's obviously improving, but I'd still be steering clear of the lesser-known brands for a good half decade or more.

They take many years to get to Earth and return in their home planet timeframe. If they can boost to a good % of c the apparent time is less.

Is there a problem with those statements, or is it because we live a measly 3-4 score and 10 years that a decades long journey is a problem?

Languished due to age and the manufacturer dropping support when it reached 10 years old (pretty good run TBH). While I doubt there's many of these left, there's still enough for the hobbyist developer to spend some time on them - and what better way to test AI than on something that's been optimised as much as it ever normally would be?
I'd also note that I've still got a few PCs and laptops of that vintage still bootable and able to run.

Concur. Some examples
- you need approval from finance to spend $$$. Solution - build that approval into the requesting process - that way you only get requests that have financial approval already. Bonus - cost centre is included and can be charged automatically.
- people request things for other people in the Justification field (which almost never had anything useful in it anyway). Solution - add field for who gets the service, remove the Justification field (they can sort that out with their manager offline). Bonus - can automate delivery to the person who is getting the service.

When you really break a lot of these things down to the constituent parts there are many that are an automation development blob from saving $$$$.

This is it exactly - the higher ups are too lazy/unqualified to identify and resolve business process automation so are counting on pointing the finger at CoPilot when things don't improve enough. I went from a team of 5+ to 3 (minimum allowed) after working through this in our group, and that started out as interpreting what people had free-text written on a printed-out form, and while at it also saved hundreds of FTE hours monthly further down the line in automated service allocation and provision.

That's what happens when you systematically reduce taxes on your rich.
https://govfacts.org/long-term-challenges-future/economic-transformation/economic-inequality-trends/how-80-years-of-changing-us-tax-policy-have-reshaped-american-wealth/
https://inequality.org/article/tax-the-rich-we-did-that-once/