Billionaires own the government.

If they push for UBI it will be so they can easily separate the useless eaters from the productive people they need, and then they'll be sending Terminators around to everyone who claims UBI.

1. You have a point. Current reactors are around 30% efficient because they have to have liquid water to cool the reactor, and there are limits to that even with very high pressures. Thus carnot cycle limitations apply. It basically means that a nuclear reactor has to produce 3GW thermal (GWt), to produce 1GWe, so it has to exhaust 2 GWt as waste. Increase the temperature to the point you get 50%, and suddenly you only need to generate 2GWt to produce 1GWe, cutting waste heat in half. A much easier problem to solve at that point.
2. As you identify, there's a limit to what you can dump into the Earth. It just transfers heat too slowly to be practical in most situations. It's actually a problem I ran into when looking at geothermal heat pumps up north, like North Dakota and Alaska. You can actually end up cooling the earth so much as to lose efficiency or effectiveness over time. You might actually want to run some solar thermal panels and pump heat into the system during the summer. Between it being one of the more expensive options and actually less effective than air cooling, it isn't on my standard list.
3. Salt vats would still be a form of air cooling. Better options might be to list waste heat scavenging for zone heating or other industrial purposes. For example, it could be used to help dry new lumber, paper, fabrics, and food (dehydration). Laundries could use it for hot water for washing. Greenhouse heating, and aquaculture.
4. Micro-reactors still require cooling as per the above, and aren't actually in production right now, sadly.
To be clear, I'm not fixated upon large WCRs. I was just looking at the water-cooling restraint many fixate upon.

Indeed. I'd consider it much more likely if we had a process where we could freeze and revive so much as an otherwise healthy mouse. Much less a technically and realistically already dead human.

Because billionaires are totally going to hand out vast amounts of money so people who don't make money for them can sit around at home watching pr0n.

UBI cultists love to talk about how evil the rich are while also claiming that the rich will pay them to do nothing productive. Because billionaires are such lovely, caring people.

There are some pretty good AI songs out there. Lots of really bad ones, but people who know what they're doing can now easily make the songs they want to hear.

I know someone who was a moderately-successful musician in the 90s (some Top 40 songs at the time) and now makes his own songs with AI after being out of music completely for twenty years. You could kind of tell the early ones were AI-generated but the later ones not really.

Sure, but in most cases their music is still owned by the label they signed their souls to. Who can license it to anyone they want to turn into AI slop.

Historically, musicians signed bad deals because the music labels were gatekeepers and if they wanted to have the success of a big popular band they had to sell their souls to get it.

Now musicians can make a decent living without having to sign their soul away. But thirty years ago there wasn't a lot of choice for most people.

Sending all your files to Microsoft is now supposed to be a security feature.

"Security" is now a codeword for "we're going to steal all your shit for your own good, and you will pay us for it."

I just set one up for my mother-in-law. Setup worked great until Windows Update couldn't install an update and couldn't not install an update, so I had to reinstall Windows to fix it. Then I copied over all the old files and went to back it up with Clonezilla and discovered that Microsoft had turned on disk encryption by default so now I have to figure out how to turn that off because I don't want her to lose all her data at some point in the future when something breaks and expect me to figure out a way to decrypt it.

I thought Windows was malware, but it seems to be progressing to Ransomware.

You're just starting to acknowledge the possibility?

The next Star Wars movie will be told in Stormtrooper vlog posts interspersed with 'look at my new armor' and 'here's how I apply my Stormtrooper makeup' videos from Foxtrot Squad.

Many of the Bigfoot and Stormtrooper vlogs on Youtube are more entertaining than the Hollywood movies I've watched in the last few years.

That's still fixable. Just like how most computers are air cooled and not water cooled. They could build a very large air cooling tower and not need water at all.

Cooling from cheap to expensive:
1. Take in water, return water some amount hotter. Requires the most water to limit temperature rise.
2. Take in water, evaporate some of the water in a cooling tower. Results in less water, but also takes less water and controls temperature rise better
3. Dry cooling.

Most systems are actually something of a hybrid of the three.

There's yet one more problem (among many): Cryogenic freezing doesn't prevent ice crystals from forming, shattering cell membranes.
Basically, the body is mush where it is critical for it not to be for a successful resuscitation.

Doing that would be stupid because we know the government will try to bail them out.

You can't make rational economic decisions when the government will interfere with the market any time it feels like it. That just turns the whole thing into a casino.

Equating AI with Pac-Man isn't really the intellectual flex you probably think it is.