And I want to be clear in the above: I fully acknowledge the irony, in that the US tech industry has been a powerhouse. There seems to be a massive disconnect in the US between tech innovation and tech infrastructure. The US is a world-leader in the former. It's consistently a deep laggard on the latter. The reasons why the US has so much trouble getting its act together on infrastructure and systems are complex, but it is remarkable to see, as someone who has spent their life in a mix of the US and Iceland. And it's not just Iceland that has it's act together on these sort of things - it's most of the developed world, and even surprising amounts of the developing world.

, with the most sophisticated banking system

Any American who believes this should try living overseas for a year or two. The US banking system is insanely backwards. Numerous aspects of the US medical and government systems as well. It's hard to explain it to you unless you experience it.

Checks are just one symptom (in Iceland, 15 years ago bank tellers would look at you weird and have to get the manager if you had a personal check, and 10 years ago, stopped taking them altogether). For like 15-20 years, we've had free instant bank-to-bank money transfers (no third party involved), everyone on the same service, to the point that if someone is collecting money for a gift for a coworker's birthday, it's always been, they just send an email with their bank details, instead of going around and collecting cash. All your bills - all of them - just show up in your bank's inbox. On and on.

I mentioned the medical system. Let me give a random example. In the US, you go to a doctor and they determine you need a prescription. They or their receptionist have to ask what pharmacy you want it at. It gets routed through SecureScripts (before that, it was all phone based!), and depending, you may also need to also call into the pharmacy before you go there - and if you need it "transferred", it's a multihour process. Here? The doctor just jots it into their computer, that's it. You can literally just walk out of the doctor's office into the pharmacy next door (or any other pharmacy), tell them your name, and they go grab your order.

Everything is connected. Everything is interoperable. All keyed to your kennitala (ID number) . And the kennitala is only a key, not a password. The fact that a SSN in the US is treated as both a key and a password is insane, from a security standpoint; by contrast, you can just post your kennitala online, it's fine. We have multiple actual authentication methods. The most convenient is the Auðkenni system. Our SIM cards store credentials in a separate cryptographic chip. When we need 2FA, for any business or government agency (all on the same system), it sends a special SMS that the phone routes to the SIM card to process, and then (at the OS level) pops up an authentication dialogue, so we have universal 2FA, linked to our kennitala, in all of our phones. It's been this way for like 15+ years.

Or let's talk taxes. You all know what it's like in America, so let's explain what it's like in Iceland. I get an email letting me know it's tax time. I go to the tax office website. I get 2FA login via my phone. My tax forms are right there. They're already filled out, with all of the information already collected. For like 90% of the population, it's just click through, verify it's correct, and submit. Some people may have some things that weren't logged, such as overseas investments or whatnot, but for most people, it's like a five minute process.

On and on. It's been so weird seeing America getting things 1-2 decades after us and acting like, "wow, we're leading in banking technology!", etc. No, you're an aged dinosaur, way behind the rest of the world because none of your systems work together and you're so slow to adapt to change.

Don't worry. The current regime has plan in place to simply not deliver mailed ballots in states that have any chance of going against your desired outcome.

To paraphrase the apocryphal Stalin: Altering one ballot is a felony. Shitcanning a million ballots is a statistic.

You can generally tell when the true operational cost, including cost of capital, significantly exceeds employee cost by looking at whether they pay people to work in the middle of the night.

There are quite a lot of places where that happens. Just using the OP's list:

Airplanes: there are fewer flights at night, but that's when a lot of required maintenance happens. The Internet tells me the average lease on a Boeing 737 is around a few hundred thousand USD per month. Bigger planes would have even bigger differentials with their crew salaries.

Machinists: there's a reason you picked this example. Really expensive machine tools can run into the multiple millions though, plus maintenance and consumables. Lease rates can easily go into double digit thousands per month. And that's not even considering exotic stuff. Lots of high end shops operate around the clock.

Radiologists: Most of the operating costs for big medical imaging equipment are going to exceed the employee operating it, though maybe not the radiologist. Getting a radiologist to work outside regular business (or banking) hours is a chore, but the techs do so routinely. Sometimes the actual operation is the expensive bit so no night shifts, like anything involving a SQUID.

Tower cranes: don't work as much at night probably due to safety, but lease rates mostly in the double digit thousands a month and up.

Trading analysts: Bloomberg terminals are a few tens of thousands per year, so no. Some of the crazy HFT stuff probably does cost ridiculous amounts though, so maybe the quants writing algorithms for it rather than the traders.

Garbage men: maybe. Probably yes if you count the salary of one guy, no if two.

Concrete truck drivers: probably. Also probably semi trucks.

MWh is a unit of capacity

The word you're looking for is "energy."

"Capacity" can have pretty much any units depending on what you're talking about. Generation capacity, for example, is usually measured in Watts. It's common to talk about battery capacity in terms of power because if it can't provide enough power it's no good at all, and then time; i.e. make it work, then make it good.

The Internet tells me that California is a mythical place invented to tempt children into windowless vans and teenagers into dressing in black and giving money to poor people. Just like the Internet told me the things the GP said.

I don't think "continuous" means what you think it means. The reason you can do this is because the models are continuous.

"JaiLIP" is just running gradient descent on the input until you get the effect on the output you want. The same thing works just fine on our brains except it's less efficient because we can't (yet) differentiate over our output. We call them "optical illusions" even though they don't have anything to do with actual optics.

What are letters? Books are just splotches of dark ink on light paper.

And yet you'd never heard of the Transformers before you saw the Michael Bay movies. I guess you were 11 or 12 at the time?

I'm told she's had some well-liked stories.

Still, James Gunn seems to have this obsession with pulling up C-list characters from the comics and putting them in central roles in movies. For a lot of the running length of Superman, it was a movie about some guy named Mr. Terrific that nobody's ever heard of. I assume this is because he wants to tell new stories, rather than rehashing the same old origins and motives for characters that everybody's known about for years. But it's not the same as actually introducing new, appealing ideas; these characters are C-listers for a reason. Nobody cares.

Haven't seen the movie, but I've heard it's not just that ... she also apparently spends a lot of the movie not seeming to believe there's much urgency to the situation at all. That has a way of hamstringing the idea of a "ticking clock" plot.

These can be published or accessed, but never both at the same time.

It has been my experience, sad to say, that online stores aren't above selling consumer credit card information either, and I've grounds to think Amazon is one that does this.

I have an industrial air conditioner for my home. (It's a small home, but summers are increasingly severe.)

I don't recall being asked a damn thing.

My suspicion is that this is scaremongering.

I think it may be evidence that Amazon has a shitty corporate culture that squeezes every penny it can out its employees.

Corruption can happen anywhere, but it's more likely to happen in totalitarian cultures where people feel like the system is rigged anyway. That's why countries like Russia and China have corruption problems. But I suspect the same feelings of me vs. the system occur in a capitalist enterprise like Amazon where employees are governed by dystopian, rigid, computerized metrics.