You wrote: "In my experience, most of the time, when a business says "we can't find qualified applicants" what they really mean is "we can't find *perfect* employees to hire, or the truth is we just don't want to hire at all right now"."

Two other interconnected things most such businesses may mean but are not saying out loud (related to your "perfect" point) are:
* we are not willing to pay enough for experienced talent (especially if we might be able to bring in H-1Bs or alternatively American W2s via big consulting shops who get paid at employee wages given IRS concerns due to tax laws lobbied for by big consulting shops to make it financially dangerous to hire individuals who are sole proprietors as 1099 consultants at double or triple employee wages), and
* we are not willing to pay to train someone who has the capacity to learn and grow over a year or two (especially because we are afraid they will then move on elsewhere for a pay bump we won't give them if they stay).

There's also often a subtext of age discrimination like with the computer field, and also a sense that all programmers are essentially interchangeable.

Companies may have good reasons for these reservations in given the changing nature of the competitive economic landscape and employees also no longer typically working at one big company for life as was more common in the 1960s. But, given a difference sense of company loyalty back then (going both ways), there was an expectation for significant on-the-job training in the 1950s and 1960s in the USA, where companies like GE in NY would even pay for employees to get college educations. Or IBM with its in-house training for technical managers especially.

Or for HP in Silicon Valley who also trained people:
https://livefromsiliconvalley....
"When people ask why Hewlett-Packard still matters, the answer is straightforward: HP established operating patterns that shaped generations of Valley companies. The "HP Way" emphasized respect for engineers, decentralized decision-making, close customer contact, and disciplined experimentation. Those principles influenced firms from Intel to Apple and continue to appear in management playbooks today. HP also trained talent that later founded or led other major businesses, making it both a company and an institutional source of Silicon Valley leadership."

I am obviously generalizing a lot here since some companies provide some degree of training, but in general, how many large companies does the USA still have that follow anything close to the "HP Way"? And especially how many will offer on-the-job training to anyone over 40-50?

Of course, there is a more local-to-the-USA part of the jobs story too (even as it is not as big a global issue as the one in my sig):
"Americans Don't Realize The Empire Is Already Falling Apart"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
        "Spain. Britain. The Soviet Union. Three of history's most powerful empires all destroyed by the same 7-stage pattern. Military overextension. Currency debasement. Debt spiral. Loss of productive capacity. Social decay. Reserve currency collapse. Sudden fall.
        Historians and economists have identified this sequence repeating across centuries with alarming consistency. And in 2026, the United States shows every measurable sign of Stage 5 right now.
        In this video, we break down:
        * Why America's $36 trillion debt is past the point of no return;
        * How the U.S. lost its productive economy and replaced it with a financial casino;
        * Why the dollar's share of global reserves has dropped 12 points since 2000;
        * The consumer sentiment reading lower than ANY war, recession, or pandemic in 75 years;
        * What China, BRICS, and the Global South are quietly doing about it;
        This isn't politics. This isn't conspiracy. This is arithmetic."

Personally I don't feel the USA debt is "past the point of no return" theoretically even if it might be politically/practically. Restore tax rates from the 1970s, remove the cap on Social Security earnings tax but cap payouts at current max levels, and add a 0.1% tax on every stock sale -- and the US debt will be quickly reduced (plus there will be plenty of money for medicare-for-all, keeping Social Security solvent, and reinvesting in physical and social infrastructure). A day of legislative voting in Congress plus a quick signature by the president, and the USA would be on a sound economic footing again.

Whether there is the political will to do all that is a different story. It would require the GOP to move past the "Two Santa Clauses tactic" for winning elections:
https://www.salon.com/2018/02/...
"In fact, Republican strategist Jude Wanniski's 1974 "Two Santa Clauses Theory" has been the main reason why the GOP has succeeded in producing our last two Republican presidents, Bush and Trump (despite losing the popular vote both times). It's also why Reagan's economy seemed to be "good."
        Here's how it works, laid it out in simple summary:
        First, when Republicans control the federal government, and particularly the White House, spend money like a drunken sailor and run up the US debt as far and as fast as possible. This produces three results - it stimulates the economy thus making people think that the GOP can produce a good economy, it raises the debt dramatically, and it makes people think that Republicans are the "tax-cut Santa Claus."
        Second, when a Democrat is in the White House, scream about the national debt as loudly and frantically as possible, freaking out about how "our children will have to pay for it!" and "we have to cut spending to solve the crisis!" This will force the Democrats in power to cut their own social safety net programs, thus shooting their welfare-of-the-American-people Santa Claus. ..."

Like with modern monetary theory, governments who have a dominant world currently like the USA essentially print whatever money they want to pay their bills -- and they then can use taxes to manage the size of the available money supply to manage inflation. It's so weird that people (the Fed especially) act like the only way to reduce inflation is to increase interest rates to slow (damage) the economy when the other obvious solution is to raise taxes to take money out of circulation. Why don't we ever hear the Fed saying, "we only have to raise interest rates because politicians refuse to raise taxes"?
https://www.investopedia.com/m...

Fixing the US debt issue with higher taxes (allowing interest rates to stay lower) might not fix all the jobs issues though as AI and robotics continue to accelerate exponentially. More ideas on dealing with that collected by me in 2010:
https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-...
        "This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."

As with my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

Ultimately, it was just a car lugging around all the things required for an internal combustion engine AND electric vehicle parts at the same time. Double the complexity and a rolling compromise.

That was my experience owning a hybrid. Ultimately, the controller part that mated the EV and ICE vehicle parts was what failed, and the cost of trying to fix that negated pretty much any fuel savings we'd ever get out of the vehicle.

A plug-in hybrid with a proper battery that can run as an EV for short trips and use ICE for backup makes a lot more sense. The range extender hybrids are just extra complexity for what's just a hack to reduce fuel consumption. But to maximize that fuel consumption, you kinda need to tweak your driving patterns to optimize for EV behaviour, which is also a technique that can get significant fuel savings on an ICE car.

Princeton alumnus here (undergrad, staff, grad, and later for a time townie and tigernet user). I agree things need to change -- and using AI as a tutor is a great option for some situations (even as doing that prevents the strengthening of human communities through human interactions).

A couple essays I wrote on that, the first from 2007 focusing mostly on K-12:
https://patapata.sourceforge.n...
"Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change. ...
        So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process. ..."

And a Princeton-specific one from 2008 (and revised later):
"Post-Scarcity Princeton, or, Reading between the lines of PAW for prospective Princeton students, or, the Health Risks of Heart Disease"
https://pdfernhout.net/reading...
        "Wikipedia. GNU/Linux. WordNet. Google. These things were not on the visible horizon to most of us even as little as twenty years ago. Now they have remade huge aspects of how we live. Are these free-to-the-user informational products and services all there is to be on the internet or are they the tip of a metaphorical iceberg of free stuff and free services that is heading our way? Or even, via projects like the RepRap 3D printer under development, are free physical objects someday heading into our homes? If a "post-scarcity" iceberg is coming, are our older scarcity-oriented social institutions prepared to survive it? Or like the Titanic, will these social institutions sink once the full force of the iceberg contacts them? And will they start taking on water even if just dinged by little chunks of sea ice like the cheap $100 laptops that are ahead of the main iceberg? Or, generalizing on Mayeroff's theme, will people have the courage to discover and create new meanings for old institutions they care about as a continuing process? ...
        When I think back on someone like, say Shinobu "Dink" Asano of the PU psychology department staff related to undergraduate students, I can imagine no finer or more caring a person. Her presence made my life better at PU, both as an undergraduate and also when I was a graduate student. We still chatted a few times and she read one of my grad school papers I gave her ("The Self-Replicating Garden"). She pointed out correctly how alienated it sounded, and that was something I really had not noticed or thought much on (although she used more compassionate words, of course). I hadn't know until just now on using Google that she and her husband had spent time in Japanese-American internment camps in the USA during WWII... [Although I think on this over a year later and think now she did mention that her husband did not like reunions because of putting up the walls but I did not think much on it at the time, as many will not think much on the points here at the time?] That obviously has implications both in seeing alienation first-hand and also seeing the limits of walled gardens (as opposed to, say, networked ones). I made improvements to that idea later in both those ways. Here is a two-author paper (my wife and me) on people networking to build self-replicating gardens. ... And this includes a mention of the value of networks of space habitats; see the section on Island Biogeography. ... So if my other work or this essay help some people someday, thank Dink.
        Which leads me to reflect on something. I am sure she tried her very best to make the PU psychology department a humane place, and I have fond memories of her. Nonetheless, what Gatto suggests applies to K-12 (school mainly as social control, not education), I suggest applies equally well to college as it is currently constructed as an institution. And it applies even more so to graduate school, which is becoming more and more a perceived requirement of any sort of professional career in the USA. [See the book "Disciplined Minds" on that.] I suggest it applies no matter how many nice people there are at PU, as long as its mythology for both undergraduate and graduate education revolves around scarcity, and related themes of elitism (alienation), competition (destructiveness), and excellence (perfectionism). I suggest it applies no matter how prettily you architect a place in faux Cambridge-style ..., I suggest an internment camp is in some sense an internment camp even if it looks like a country club like the "Village" in the Prisoner series, if it tries to discipline minds and break wills ... and even if it extends across the planet in various ways. ....

I'm not going to deny most anti-social media and too much screen time is bad for humans, especially kids. The suggestion you make to have kids spend more time outside is great -- although it is difficult to implement if all the other kids they might play with are inside, and if parents nowadays face arrest for "neglect" if they encourage their children to learn independence outside the home. See the book "Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder" and "In Defense of Childhood: Protecting Kids' Inner Wildness" for example.

All that said, there is a deeper issue here, which is that robotics and other automation including AI are changing the very nature of our economy, and "modern" schools were invented in Prussia in the 1800s for a very specific purpose of making most people into obedient cannon fodder.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"The Underground History of American Education: Chapter 7 The :Russian Connection
https://archive.org/details/Jo...
"John Gatto Prussian Education"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"The particular utopia American believers chose to bring to the schoolhouse was Prussian. The seed that became American schooling, twentieth-century style, was planted in 1806 when Napoleon's amateur soldiers bested the professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena. When your business is renting soldiers and employing diplomatic extortion under threat of your soldiery, losing a battle like that is pretty serious. Something had to be done.
      The most important immediate reaction to Jena was an immortal speech, the "Address to the German Nation" by the philosopher Fichte â" one of the influential documents of modern history leading directly to the first workable compulsion schools in the West. Other times, other lands talked about schooling, but all failed to deliver. Simple forced training for brief intervals and for narrow purposes was the best that had ever been managed. This time would be different.
      In no uncertain terms Fichte told Prussia the party was over. Children would have to be disciplined through a new form of universal conditioning. They could no longer be trusted to their parents. Look what Napoleon had done by banishing sentiment in the interests of nationalism. Through forced schooling, everyone would learn that "work makes free," and working for the State, even laying down one's life to its commands, was the greatest freedom of all. Here in the genius of semantic redefinition lay the power to cloud men's minds, a power later packaged and sold by public relations pioneers Edward Bernays and Ivy Lee in the seedtime of American forced schooling. ...
      Prussia was prepared to use bayonets on its own people as readily as it wielded them against others, so it's not all that surprising the human race got its first effective secular compulsion schooling out of Prussia in 1819, the same year Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, set in the darkness of far-off Germany, was published in England. ..."

And to do that, modern school teachers mainly teach seven lessons:
https://www.informationliberat...
"Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class position, indifference, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are prime training for permanent underclasses, people deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And over time this training has shaken loose from its own original logic: to regulate the poor. For since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy, and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution's original grasp to the point that it now seizes the sons and daughters of the middle classes as well. ..."

But do we still need to shape children to become compliant Prussians? As I wrote in 2007:
"Why educational technology has failed schools"
https://patapata.sourceforge.n...
        "... Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change.
        But, history has shown schools extremely resistant to change. ...
        Essentially, the conventional notion is that the compulsory schooling approach is working, it just needs more money and effort. Thus a push for higher standards and pay and promotion related to performance to those standards. Most of the technology then should be used to ensure those standards. That "work harder" and "test harder" approach has been tried now for more than twenty years in various ways, and not much has changed. Why is that? Could it be that schools were designed to produce exactly the results they do? [See John Taylor Gatto's writing on that.] And that more of the same by more hard work will only produce more of the same results? Perhaps schools are not failing to do what they were designed; perhaps in producing people fit only to work in highly structured environments doing repetitive work, they are actually succeeding at doing what they were designed for? Perhaps digging harder and faster and longer just makes a deeper pit? ...
          But then, with so much produced for so little effort [thanks to a post-industrial information age productivity], perhaps the very notion of work itself needs to change? Maybe most people don't need to "work" in any conventional way (outside of home or community activities)? ...
    But then is compulsory schooling [designed mainly to turn human beings into compliant robots] really needed when people live in such a [post-industrial] way? In a gift economy, driven by the power of imagination, backed by automation like matter replicators and flexible robotics to do the drudgery, isn't there plenty of time and opportunity to learn everything you need to know? Do people still need to be forced to learn how to sit in one place for hours at a time? When people actually want to learn something like reading or basic arithmetic, it only takes around 50 contact hours or less to give them the basics, and then they can bootstrap themselves as far as they want to go. Why are the other 10000 hours or so of a child's time needed in "school"? Especially when even poorest kids in India are self-motivated to learn a lot just from a computer kiosk -- or a "hole in the wall"...
        So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process. ..."

despite the fact that no one asked for it

Not exactly true; Unity was first seen in the netbook edition, and it was darn near perfect for that environment. The netbook edition was shipped pre-installed on various netbooks until Microsoft got their thumb out, so I'd argue that someone definitely asked for it, and Ubuntu delivered.

Switching the non-netbook Ubuntu to Unity maybe wasn't the best choice, but at the same time, that's around when both KDE and GNOME kinda lost their collective minds and decided to rewrite just about everything, so I kinda consider Unity to be the desktop that got Ubuntu users through that mess until we had more sane alternatives.

Yeah, but if you figure many households have kids or elderly non-drivers, if it was roughly two people per household per car, then the high speed rail budget would be about $10K per household, which is in the range of the latest Chinese electric vehicles (without tariffs):

Example from: https://money.usnews.com/inves...
====
The average new car in the U.S. in March had a list price of $51,456, according âOEto Kelley Blue Book.

In China, there are more than 200 battery-powered models, including hybrids, for sale at less than the equivalent of $25,000, according to DCar, an information and trading âplatform.

Reuters compiled a list of the five best-selling electric vehicles in China that start under $12,000 using DCar data.

These small EVs aren't available for sale in American showrooms - and may never be - but for about the price of an average new car in the U.S., a consumer in China could buy all five of these EVs.

----

Geely [now parent company of safety-focused Volvo] EX2: Starting price, $10,060

The pure electric Geely EX2 was the top-selling model domestically for any kind of âvehicle in 2025.

The small EV comes with a bevy of nifty features: a front trunk, storage compartments throughout the cabin and a 14.6-inch âcentral âtouchscreen running on a system that âGeely developed. The top-trim version âhas a range of about 255 miles on the Chinese test standard.

Known as the "Star Wish" in China, the EX2 was a hit from âits 2024 launch and Geely began sales âin Brazil, Indonesia and Thailand last year.

"When you get in, you don't feel like you are in a small car," auto analyst Felipe Munoz said. "It feels better in terms of quality and bigger in terms of size."
====

It's actually more like 0.75 cars per person in CA looking it up. Admittedly I am doing some handwaving here. But, self-driving cars could pick up some of the slack by making it easier to share a car when needed.

Overall, my point is just to see that there are various surprising alternative options for spending lots of money ostensibly to help people. The point is not so much whether I have the numbers precisely. The point is that they are surprisingly close given *externalities* (like healthcare costs from pollution, the cost of the Persian Gulf deployment force, and so on) which an loosely-regulated market-based system often ignores.

Also, what all this leaves out is that my original argument was that giving people luxury free safer electric cars (almost twenty years ago when I wrote that) may make sense given avoided costs for insurance and healthcare (accidents, pollution).

If you then add another $10K per car from avoiding building high-speed rail, it makes the case even better, and we may be looking at $20k+ avoided costs per better car.

On your point on running up deficits, that's apparently the plan:
https://www.salon.com/2018/02/...
        "First, when Republicans control the federal government, and particularly the White House, spend money like a drunken sailor and run up the US debt as far and as fast as possible. This produces three results - it stimulates the economy thus making people think that the GOP can produce a good economy, it raises the debt dramatically, and it makes people think that Republicans are the "tax-cut Santa Claus."
        Second, when a Democrat is in the White House, scream about the national debt as loudly and frantically as possible, freaking out about how "our children will have to pay for it!" and "we have to cut spending to solve the crisis!" This will force the Democrats in power to cut their own social safety net programs, thus shooting their welfare-of-the-American-people Santa Claus."

Bingo. My essay on that idea from 2009: https://groups.google.com/g/op...
"This essay explain why luxury safer electric (or plug-in hybrid) cars should be free-to-the-user at the point of sale in the USA, and why this will reduce US taxes overall. Essentially, unsafe gasoline-powered automobiles in the USA pose a high cost on society (accidents, injuries, pollution, defense), and the costs of making better cars would pay for themselves and then some. This essay is an example of using post-scarcity ideology to understand the scarcity-oriented ideological assumptions in our society and how those outdated scarcity assumptions are costing our society in terms of creating and maintaining artificial scarcity. ..."

The book "Abundance" has an entire section on the failure of high speed rail in California despite ldecades-long government support at all levels. In general, the argument they make is that regulations created in previous generations (to avoid the worst excesses of reckless construction) now get in the way of creating solutions to today's issues like a need for clean energy, improved transportation, and affordable housing. The authors claim the book is written "by liberals, for liberals" and there whole point is to show how a previous generation of "liberals" made it impossible for this generation of "liberals" to get anything done. This also happens in conjunction with conservatives who stop liberal projects by using laws liberals created, since it is much easier to stop things using the law than to make them happen. As another example, the authors say it is common for liberals to do things like put up signs in their yards that say they stand with the homeless while simultaneously voting for zoning policies to defend their property values by making it impossible to build affordable housing (including things like rooming houses, which are often prevented by minimum lot size requirements and also minimum parking area requirements for occupants who generally don't own cars).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Abundance is a nonfiction book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson published by Avid Reader Press in March 2025. The book examines the reasons behind the lack of progress on ambitious projects in the United States, including those related to affordable housing, infrastructure, and climate change. It became a New York Times Bestseller. Klein and Thompson argue that the regulatory environment in many liberal cities, while well intentioned, stymies development. ..."