This looks pretty close to what the rail boom of the late 1860s and early 1870s looked like. Some corporations and investors then did some pretty incestuous stuff of a similar. The resulting bubble pop was devastating to the US economy. But it is notable that even as that bubble popped, the overall amount of rail continued to grow, with almost every major metric (amount of track laid down, number of passenger-miles traveled per a month, number of locomotives, number of overall stations, etc.) barely showing blips as they continued to climb.

Has the Netscape trademark been declared abandoned yet?

This almost seems to be convincing us that the absolute worst statements about Russian culture today are accurate. Invade another country, continue that invasion with warcrimes and drafting of young men to be sent as cannon fodder, barely a whimper. But interfere with a videogame platform, and now we have a protest. Pretty despicable priorities. On the other hand, this may be overly negative; this protest itself seems small, and it may be that people expect less pushback or jailing of protesters about this sort of thing than those protesting the invasion of Ukraine.

The US of AI in x-ray imaging did grow the demand for radiologists That's accurate. That doesn't that AI will necessarily grow jobs in general, or even if it does that AI creating more jobs will not cause enough disruptions that it will take time to shakeout. It is possible for example that a lot of jobs which are being lost to AI now will be temporary as corporations realize more the limits of the technology. It is also possible that what we're seeing now in terms of job losses will become more extreme as the technology improves even further. Predicting what is going to happen here is genuinely very difficult.

So, SO true!

I'm constantly frustrated by the work situation I'm in now. The company keeps growing by acquisitions/partnerships and expanding its need for I.T. support. But there's zero interest in increasing head-count for the "rank and file" people doing the sysadmin or support work. Meanwhile, they've added 2 mangers for the department and both do little besides holding numerous meetings that feel like discovery sessions. They continually ask questions to try to understand pretty basic I.T. concepts and propose senseless changes (that we often have to reduce our level of daily support in order to work through for them). They literally reduce our productivity by being here!

Scale matters. And how serious an issue does depend on percentage, not just absolute levels. Moreover, percentage is especially important when one is considering issues of prioritization, where I explicitly compared it to golf. So far, you've doubled down on insulting people rather than making any argument involving sources. It might also occur to you that you are apparently assuming that everyone you disagree must have some dishonest agenda. But if you bothered to actually read my comment with a minimum of good faith understanding, you would not that the comment explicitly notes specific problems from AI data centers, which should suggest to you that the agenda you apparently want to impose on the comment is not accurate. Now, it would be appreciated if you could actually attempt to respond with something resembling reasoning and sources and less insults. But I do appreciate from our prior interactions that is apparently difficult for you to do, so have a good day.

There appear to be two interrelated issues with your sources. (Although thank you for giving sources, which was much more than the person you were replying to did.) First, there's a substantial issue with how representative these environmentalists are from the general movement. The ability to point to specific people doesn't really say much about the movement as a whole (although I will grant there's a decent fraction of the environmental movement which really does seem stuck in a 1970s sort of "degrowth" or "antigrowth" attitude). But you seem to also confuse sources saying "Hey, this is creating a serious problem" and not wanting to have that thing at all. The Science.org article for example is about the actual fact that steel production really does contribute seriously to climate change, but then much of the article is about the effort to make steel manufacturing more environmentally friendly. So the article is not about getting rid of steel manufacturing but about making it work better. Others in your list are not about getting rid of things, but moderation. To use the very last example, large scale car use really is creating a lot of problems. But one can recognize that and favor more moderation in terms of car use without getting rid of cars as a whole.

Narcc, why are you incapable of polite discussion with people you disagree with? Would it hurt you so much to some day, maybe try to do people the courtesy of responding to what they have with some detailed arguments or reasoning rather than insults?

The environmental issues are exaggerated. It is true that electricity prices are going up, https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.solarreviews.com%2Fblog%2Faverage-electricity-cost-increase-per-year but this is barely a blip above the current (very high) inflation rates https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.minneapolisfed.org%2Fabout-us%2Fmonetary-policy%2Finflation-calculator%2Fconsumer-price-index-1913-. The complaints about water usage are also not highly reasonable. The vast majority of water used for data centers get reused. Current data center water usage is about a 10th of the water usage for golf courses by the most extreme plausible estimates, and US golf courses account for a bit over 1% of all water usage, so being concerned about data centers here when a more useful thing would be to not have golf courses in the middle of Arizona would be a far more reasonable concern. https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.usga.org%2Fcontent%2Fusga%2Fhome-page%2Farticles%2F2025%2F03%2Fwater-conservation-playbook-released-golf-industry.html. There are legitimate grid concerns; AI data centers don't just use a lot of power, but they use it in hard to predict ways, which makes load balancing the grid very difficult. So there are legitimate concerns.

But it seems like much of the left has adopted an anything involving LLM AIs is bad attitude in the US. This seems connected to the fact that the US attitude towards LLM AIs is more negative than pretty much almost every other country https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Ftoday.yougov.com%2Finternational%2Farticles%2F53654-english-speaking-western-countries-more-negative-about-ai-than-western-europeans. But rather than having a serious discussion about the positives and negatives of this technology (and there are a lot in both columns), there's this tendency to just pick any possible negative and throw it on the wall. This is also particularly unfortunate right now in the US because there's major problems with the Trump administration rolling back all sorts of environmental regulations, including not just those for CO2 but for many other pollutants, and the administration is now actively stopping almost any new US wind and solar on a large scale. While there's been some legal pushback against some of that (see for example, this victory just today https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2025%2F12%2F08%2Fclimate%2Ftrump-offshore-wind-federal-judge.html ) this would be a far better use of these groups time and resources than going after a specific industry.

Proprietary service drops support for proprietary protocol..

It may not be attracting to you but it is certainly popular. ChatGPT has about 800 million active users as of April https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.demandsage.com%2Fchatgpt-statistics%2F. Now, that's using data in part from OpenAI, but other metrics which are not from OpenAI paint a pretty similar picture. ChatGPT's website is one of the world's 10 most visited websites according to Similarweb and has been consistently that way for over a year now https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.similarweb.com%2Ftop-websites%2F . Whatever problems ChatGPT has, lack popularity is not one of them.

I agree we're in the state of decline. Every nation in history has gone through or is going through the same cycle of ramping up, peaking, and then declining.

It's not just in the level of formal education people absorbed .... It's everywhere. I've always been into music and played in an alt-rock band for a while, back in the 1990's. I used to say there was no such thing as "bad music". It was all subjective and anything could be pleasing to the ears of the right listener. In recent years, I'd have to say that's still a fact -- but ... we're seeing a sharp increase in popular music that's mostly computer-generated or simplistic/repetitive, vs requiring a lot of musical skill. How many of today's rock songs actually incorporate complex guitar parts? How many have complicated drum riffs or musically interesting bass lines? Even with just the lyrics -- I'd say it's the exception, today, for a song to tell a full story or have deep meaning or clever lyrics. With your classic rock of the 60's and 70's, that was more of the norm.

The movie industry is the same way. Our local theater has such poor attendance for the latest Hollywood spew, they had to resort to showing random documentaries, which turn out to be far more interesting and draw in a more intelligent crowd, willing to pay the ticket prices.

I can't think of a sci-fi series that's more polarizing than this one in recent memory?

Even in my own group of friends, it runs about 50/50 that people either loved Alien Earth, or they thought it was trash.

I watched it because of a high recommendation from one guy I know, and tried to give it a chance. I had to stop after a few episodes. It was just painfully awful, IMO. I mean, sure - lots of money was poured into good special F/X and it's the creatures we all know from the long-running franchise. But the story line and characters were ridiculous.

I mean, sure -- let's take a bunch of kids and immediately throw them into harm's way, doing "save the planet" stuff! And "Boy Kavalier" is a bad caricature of just about every tech CEO in modern times that people like to poke fun at. Except even more over-the-top with his "poor me ... because I'm SO intelligent, nobody can even have an enjoyable conversation with me" garbage.

The thing is though? I *do* get the points people raise in favor of it. The concept had "legs" in the sense there's potential in the idea you have competing corporations with different approaches to "improving humanity" and it creates a dynamic of tensions between your cyborgs vs your hybrids or synths. It's just that to me, it felt like they took those great ideas and squandered them.

This concerns me from the standpoint of using FireSticks for TV signage purposes.

Our workplace uses the "ScreenCloud" software to turn a number of our TVs around our offices into digital sign-boards displaying things like employee birthdays and general office news, calendar info, etc.

We already had issues where Amazon decided to lock down a newer model of FireStick to the point the ScreenCloud app refused to run on it anymore. At first, the makers of ScreenCloud expected us to "root" each FireStick and do a bunch of steps to it in "developer mode" so their app could keep working on one. Then, Amazon locked them out of even that work-around. It seems the two companies got together at that point, and the result was a requirement we buy some more pricey variant of the same FireStick that's designed just for use with ScreenCloud!

We live in a society where like it or not? We marginalize crimes that involve theft of property or money, vs violent crimes against people.
Hacking almost never escalates to the level of it badly injuring or killing other humans. (You *might* argue it did if you could prove people hacking firmware or software running life support machines in hospitals was involved, or direct attacks on a person's pacemaker? But even outliers like this would be more the realm of the CIA than individual hackers.)

But even IF you imposed severe punishments for hacking? The problem is with catching these people. Sure, they tend to get caught eventually, because most criminals don't know when to stop. But you rarely recoup all the money they took from people or organizations. They probably couldn't ever get it all repaid even if you somehow forced them to work for the rest of their life for employers who turned over 100% of their paychecks towards restitution.