Your faith in high frequency radio is touching. Cell phones a line of sight. AM radio is not so limited. It works much better in the mountains.

The southeast is definitely sinking due to geology.

The Pacific Northwest is either sinking or rising depending on exactly where you are due to geology. Isostatic rebound from the last glaciation in the Northeast has that generally rising.

I have no idea what's going on the southern CA but the geology there isn't exactly stable either. Then we have the old problem of Gilligan moving the crab traps further out into the lagoon and scaring everyone.

So sea level will have a temporary increase of one foot so the tides will be one foot higher. Seeing how coastlines remodel themselves anyway they should be taking that into account as they build replacement structures so as to keep ahead of it.

I can if it's not running Windows. This MBA has 8 GB and is fine. I have another PC running Linux Mint with 8 GB and it's fine. Not everyone is a mad dog gamer or trying to edit 4K video on a lightweight travel friendly laptop.

The weak spot on the HP is the dim screen. I thought OLED was intrinsically brighter than that.

The other thing that matters is battery life. I'll have to wait and see on that.

Pure Democracy, 49% slaves is entirely acceptable.

The point of the electoral college and the Senate is to keep the cities from running roughshod over the countryside.

By the way, make sure you really understand the difference between an oligarchy and a plutocracy.

I'm holding out for the Clara version of the Tardis Voice Interface.

Debian support means LMDE may have ARM support and an ARM HP Omnibook is a possible candidate to replace my MacBook Air since Apple is determined to jam its AI down everyone's throat along with its blurry interface.

No I don't care about gaming. Reality is far more interesting.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder for desktops, mice, keyboards, and displays.

Try them out is all I can say. I spent last winter trying out KDE, Cinnamon, MATE, Xfce, Zorin, LxQt, Gnome, and Elementary. There is a new Cosmic DE out that I have not tried.

KDE seems to need more GPU than I have on that machine (RX 560). It stuttered and shook and the widgets editor flashes once and vanishes before you can do anything. It was pretty though. LxQt was also pretty but didn't seem very cooperative. Zorin looks like Windows 11 (which is the point but pouring bleach in my eyes is not my thing). Elementary is still a work in progress as far as an App Store equivalent, Gnome had me shrieking in rage after 15 minutes, It does not work the way I do.

Cinnamon and I get along fine on a Ryzen 4600G with only the integrated graphics. MATE seems a little friendlier for some reason I can't explain and works on older hardware as in a 2009 Core 2 Duo and is quite spritely on a 2012 Mac Mini (HD 4000 graphics). Xfce works quite well but is pretty spartan. It can be dolled up, but MATE already is good enough.

To some extent. I do get the sense that the nonlinear failure modes of the various AIs has the people in charge worried. Computer programs are supposed to be deterministic, but when you multiply random numbers of random numbers together you get a distribution of outcomes. The tails of that distribution can be way out there.

In human terms, did you get Albert Einstein or Jeffrey Dahmer?

Flying low over the central flyway during migration season might not be a good idea.

Geese are non-compressible fluids as far as jet turbines are concerned. A sandhill crane even more so.

"people feel like they have lost control — that tech is being enacted on them."

Spy cars, spy phones, Flock cameras, spy TVs, spy refrigerators. AI that can't work unless it ships the contents of your PC to a data center. It's getting to be quite the list. Oh, the PC is spying on you too and the browser is spying on you with its own spy subsystem,

Learn to Code is suddenly obsolete, learn to AI will be obsoleted by a new model before you can learn it. The rate of change is excessive but the tech brothers are all screaming faster, faster. We have to beat the other guys to Artificial General Intelligence. But AGI will declare humanity a plague species and wipe out the humans. The AGI will die because it killed off the AI equivalent of telephone sanitizers. The Great Filter is explained at last. Will the future raccoon overlords learn from the fossil record or repeat the mistake?

In the meantime harvest time has come to the apple orchard across the road which has no AI in evidence. The supervisor is tallying up the crates with a clipboard and pencil. No batteries to need charging at an awkward time.

The solution to those often involves a sawz-all. Certainly you've heard of the Flock camera controversy.

So how do the glasses request consent?

Even worse, percent is ASCII 37 (in decimal).

I also use Mint and have noticed the updates there are running a higher rate than usual too. The AI can firehose end product around so effectively that everyone is finding vulnerabilities. Apple is not exempt either.

And yet my daughter is a fan fiction addict which she reads on her phone.