Plain old socialism doesn't seem to work too badly, but it fails so often when the leaders turn it into communism, and most do. Scandinavian countries are doing a pretty good job. Job. But that's not really the left, is it? The fos comments are just ad hominem attacks again, aren't they? Of course some people are full of it, but I have history on my side. And don't forget, it was the Nazis who defunded the police so that they could do what they wanted to do. More left. Naziism is not right Wing no matter how they try to tell you differently.

No more Daisy Dukes?

Command economies pretty much died after 1991. China tries, but it keeps stepping on its own dick every time Xi issues an edict trying to buck market forces.

It's pretty much neutral. In our state, oil and gas subsidize other programs. I would be shitting in my pants, because without the socialist fingers in our till, we'd be paying about a buck a gallon less for gas.

Given that the Left still clings to discredited philosophies, I'm waiting for your point...

That's their business models. Period. Bid low, explain how it cannot be done the way you wanted it to be, quote the real bid halfway through.

My brother has been programming in, for pay, RPG continuously since 1976. He also works with Java, JavaScript, CL, the C universe, and Rust, plus most of the IBM universe needed to work with S/3x, AS/400, and Z series. Yes, he's a stud. He studied PDP/11 and VAX as he studied S/32, RPG, CL, and excelled in them.

He does stuff I can't pronounce. So it pleases me when he calls about the blinking lights on his home router.

You can find work in RPG, though it's mostly grunt work now.

Realistically for that school district the construction costs for charging infrastructure would not have been as bad as for say, private entities, the school district as a political subdivision of the state had self-inspection and self-permitting powers on its own properties, and that process was incredibly streamlined. They could have realistically had the grounds underground-located by the utilities using their own records ("Blue stake"), and then had some underground-detection done to confirm specific alignments didn't have unexpected surprises, then bringing in the saw-cutting tools and mini-excavators to make trenches over toward the main electrical service building and transformer room.

The site was shared with a transportation site with vehicle maintenance facilities, so electrical power to the site would probably be adequate for charging vehicles on a schedule. That doesn't mean every vehicle would be capable of being charged from near-zero to 100% on a 50A service, but it might well be possible to provide 20A to vehicles below 50% without risking overload.

But if the vehicles themselves are far too expensive to buy to begin with then they're simply not going to buy them. They even ran their own fuel service, they had their own diesel, gasoline, and even propane fueling stations, so it wasn't like they weren't accustomed to having and maintaining that infrastructure, but their vehicle choices were very closely tied with purchase price.

Your analysis is completely wrong and factually inaccurate. The industrial revolution lead to massive employment opportunities for people, which is why they flocked from the countryside to cities where factories were located. Increased productivity lead to better lives for more people and elevated many out of poverty. There was so much demand for labor in the lead up to the world wars that teenagers or young children often worked in factories as well.

Today the unemployment rates in countries where AI is being innovated on and used most have some of the lowest unemployment rates. Compare this with less advanced countries where unemployment, and specifically youth unemployment is in the double digits. The U.S. has enough demand for labor that millions upon millions of immigrants have come here over the last several decades, legally or otherwise. Making labor more efficient does not diminish the need for more of it. At most it shifts where it's most efficiently allocated.

A galactic historian once remarked that every civilization either invented AI or was conquered by a civilization that did.

The human brain operates by electro-chemical mechanisms that are rather slow compared to semiconductors. Recreating a human brain with transistors would be possible if we had it fully mapped out and it would "run" considerably faster a result. However, that doesn't necessarily give it much more capability as a result. A super intelligence is something that's functionally equivalent to a human brain in reasoning capacity but that can interface with computer hardware in a way that lets it carry out the kind of computations a computer is good at as fast as it can conceive of them.

A mechanical equivalent to a human brain is largely worthless without a body for it. Imagine your own brain if you lost all sensory input. That's what it would be like for a silicon brain. The only reason you can imagine that at all is because you've had a lifetime of sensory experiences that have shaped your brain and allow you to think in certain ways. A brain waking up in an unconnected void would go insane or develop in a way that makes it useless.

The current AIs are designed in a way that mimics part of our brain. It's useful for some tasks, but it's not intelligent or even close to it. Most of what we consider to be signs of intelligence seems like us anthropomorphizing them more than anything else. Ever instance of some random, but interesting, behavior as treated as a sign of sentience even though it cannot be reproduced even if anyone were to consider trying.

Perhaps. But Uber will have to build out its fleet of autonomous vehicles. That's a big capital investment. That they are dropping $4000 per vehicle into the existing drivers hands seems to indicate that they don't yet have a better place to invest it. Like their own equipment.

And keep in mind that the original Uber model was an app that leveraged driver-owned cars. Dump all those drivers back onto the market and some smart developers (probably Vibe coded) will build a new app for them.

That's a nice thought, but it will be abused and the losses will have to come from somewhere. It will either be the other drivers' pay or through higher prices to customers.

This is the "first time" meme moment. First time you are an expert in something marketing makes absurd claims about?

... because the economics justify it. Not for the free cheese of subsidies.

But these people still have a DSL line in from the curb. They pay for 20 Mbps (lets say) and they are owed that. It's true that a speed upgrade may be more easily made available if there's fiber at that curb. But utilities (at least here) may choose to not offer an upgrade for many other reasons. DSL to the house is standard and that's what you get.