Guess it depends on what one considers 'reasonably priced'. There is a LOT in between the crazy Sony stuff and the 30$ cheapies. For 100-200 bucks you can get stuff that more than good enough for portable use.

And those differences also span against time. Linux is great if you are always using the latest packages or compiling your own, but can be a real nightmare to support across a decade or two. OSS tends to constantly chase 'relevance', always in flux, poor backward compatibility, with the idea that users (and dependent packages) should update constantly too. For all their faults, the Microsoft and Apple OS teams put real time and energy into making their new OS work with old software.

Trump is known to really hate wind power, he thinks it ruins the view of beachside property.

Ellision and crowd probably do not care about Trump,.. but they DO want to be able to shape the next generation of consumers to fit in to their world and culture war.

Ah Utah.. the state you incorporate in when you want the business friendliness of Delaware, but know you are going to be doing something shady and need a more crime friendly place to set up.

I am not so sure the military feels all that constrained on such things. They already have the ability to ignore IP and contract laws, handing anything to anyone they like. They have a long history of taking products from one contractor and handing it over to another, or just taking things in house.

Yeah, that idea only really works in a vacuum or toy systems. It breaks down pretty quickly once you include anything beyond the pure model. Now, it is a factor, the behavior is still there, but it is quickly drowned out by others.

Not saying that it can't happen, but it increases the cost and limits growth. You do get a few special cases, but if you look at population heatmaps, they drop off rapidly once you cross that line unless there is some reason for a dense population center to be somewhere.

A key word there is 'drive', and what 'best' really entails. If a place does not have easy access to major waterways for shipping, its ability to grow is going to be pretty limited. If you look at a map of the US, where the population is and is not, it mostly comes down to 'can barges get there'.

Eh, one of the big open secrets in the field is AI researchers (as opposed to tech bros) tend to be pretty open about how AI should never be used for anything where getting an answer right is important. The hussle crowd loves selling them as solutions to science, engineering, and medicine, but meaningless slop is all it is really good for and the only place where people are willing to actually pay (since those tend to be use cases that make money while having no legal liability)

Meaning well and being serious about their field is not mutually exclusive with being pseudoscience quacks. They are usually not con artists, they really believe in what they are doing.. but just like their customers it is a belief rooted in conspirtal thinking and selective bias.

Yeah, but just like other snake oil, people are REALLY committed to the mythology and lash out at anything that contradicts it. When you can paint any disagreement as part of a vast evil conspiracy, critical thinking is just a punchline.

I am not even sure what 'PhD level reasoning' would even mean. PhDs are specializations, meaning detailed about some narrow topic. Reasoning has nothing to do with it unless you are in a specific field that involves theory on, well, reasoning.

Within my use cases, I can not picture ever wanting my OS to be 'agentic'. I already want it to STOP doing things without being asked to. Am I going to have to start finding ways to make my OS do what I ask instead of what some marketer thinks people like me want it to do?

I have found little value in arguing with the gold standard cult. Their whole world view is based off an alternative history, conspiratal thinking, and poor math skills. There is nothing really to argue with since fundamentally it is a quasi religious issue.