The theater that we play in America, that we're an egalitarian democracy, is a coping mechanism. We lost the Cold War with the Soviet Union (they lost too), even though we never recognized that it destroyed us. And we lost the War on Terror, when we wiped the remaining protections of the Constitution away.
I realized my country was in tatters when we had no fly lists and I had to take my shoes off the fly on a plane. I still don't have a Real ID and I can no longer fly.

Which is why we should focus on replacing jobs that pay the most. Ideally jobs that have rather subjective measures of success, like CEO, are ideal because even if AI is terrible at it; nobody will be able to tell the difference or offer any agreeable criticism of its performance.

Time is an illusion.

That exact phrasing is Santayana's. There are other authors throughout history that suggest the same concept, such as Burke. It's an truism that was perhaps uttered thousands of years ago. I think the most popular attribution is to William Shirer, but he was clearly quoting Santayana because Shirer's works came some five decades later.

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
— Will Durant

The first time I was given formal instructions on using a semicolon was in Pascal class. People quit using semicolon in English because it wasn't on the exams. And both US and UK education systems are focused on getting through the tests.

Plus these models are trained on Reddit and substack posts. So even the training data is psychotic.

I remember when my buddy got the original Nomad Jukebox when it first came out (2000?). Ugly as hell but it worked really and beat the iPod by about a year, and I don't think Apple really caught up until a few years after that. But Apple was smarter than Creative because they took control of the music distribution for their proprietary device, while Creative tried to work with standards and with mostly whatever the end-user wanted to use.

Winning the market is rarely about making the best product with the most value.

Enjoy your remaining years with people telling you: "I told you so!"

You can store a lot of low bitrate MP3s on a 5 GB hard drive (lowest spec of 1st Gen iPod)

USB to FireWire adapters are around $10-20. They tend to only support a subset of FireWire and don't support chaining multiple devices, but it's kind of what you need in this scenario.

I'm thinking I can save a lot of money if I only get a one way ticket.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” — Santayana, George (1905) Reason in Common Sense

That seems fair. It also seems fair that we can united and do some collective bargainig for a better deal.

Over the past century we mostly just let Capital Hill use our service men and women as fodder for imperialistic ambitions.

Your average "snowflake" needs a civics lesson more than they need rifle training.

Oh absolutely, it's mostly analog and mixed signal in the US. Very high yield and very few human hands that need to touch the product. Reels of components only getting touched when the receiver moves it off a palette. These kind of foundries don't create very many jobs though, almost no entry level jobs. And those components get priced according to what is competitive in the domestic market rather than the global market. With tariffs and shipping delays on imported components, the domestic stuff tends to creep up a bit to fill the gap (profit).