What we get from visitors to Europe is that they come back and say that they took trains everywhere, and the public transit is wonderful. Well, fine. I'm just pointing out that the vast majority of places in the US do not have anything like that. Big cities may be livable without a car, but podunk with 15,000 people is not. Not unless you have someone to drive you, or are well-financed enough to pay someone.

US driving standards are low due to the near-necessity to drive. If you can't drive, then in most places you are in a virtual prison of your own residence and can get out only if you have friends and relatives who will drive you, or you're well enough off to pay to be driven. Otherwise, it's a bicycle, even if it's 106 degrees every day for weeks on end as it was here recently in Texas, and then there's the blizzards of the north central plains. Public transportation is a joke in most of the USA, the car is far superior to any public transit because we don't like to share our space at all, and especially with strangers, and it's just not a moneymaker to be erecting railroads and creating bus lines and such. Only in the most populous places are they profitable. And as yet, the bandits of government haven't had the support to steal everyone's money in taxes to give a ride to people in cities supported by farmers and ranchers in the wilds of Wyoming or some similar place.

The self-driving mechanism may eventually allow all of us to have our cake and eat it to, while we are driven around like we would be on a bus, but can be completely alone if we want to be, or with really good friends if we want to be, and be entirely out of the driving loop so the police with the mindset of "Something bad happened so I have to jail somebody) (Particularly bad in my most previous residence of Virginia - Virginia is really harsh) so we can, if we want, climb in the back seat drunk on our asses, tell the car to go home, and be completely blameless for anything that happens with respect to traffic. Get REAL FSD that you can loan to your 10 year old to get a cone at DQ, and I'll do whatever it takes to buy it.

Don't read if its important to you, but Dog Stars sucked.

They lost me early on when they rationalized the shooting, long-range sniper-style, of 2 kids most probably out hunting for food with guns. OK, post-apocalyptic earth could be a really ugly place, but don't try to entertain me with it. Then, there's this apocalypse, but years later there's still gasoline? Tell me another one. And, a plane zero's it's oil pressure, lands in the mountains, just happens to be where it might be able to take off again, but magically there's tools and enough spare oil from somewhere to fix the oil leak, replenish what's needed, and, oh yeah, do enough work to the mountainside to be able to roll sufficiently for a takeoff, clearing out some 1000+ feet of runway of brush, rocks, etc. Then there's the cannibals at the only remaining airport with a radio, and they somehow escape them. Oh, and then again there's gasoline, not having gone bad from years of storage. Really?

The "science" in the scifi is a bridge too far for me, as well as being morally bankrupt. The only thing really believable is the guns and endless supply of ammo since yes, America does have about 500 million guns in private hands and literally trillions of rounds of ammo. There would always be guns and ammo. But otherwise, gimmie a break. Box office is often greatly enhanced by people going back multiple times, but this flick needent hold it's breath, I'm not even watching it on streaming or recommending it to friends.

Not socialism. The hallmark of socialism is stealing things. The socialists will steal the existing means of production, not build new. They end up going communist, usually, where they will steal your house, everything in it, and give to you according to your "needs." IOW, stuff you need to live, not nice to have, not luxuries of any sort, etc. Socialism / communism is slavery, pure and simple.

"government money grab."

Please rewind back to the part where we have a $2T budget deficit that will absolutely implode the economy and kill millions by the interruption of all goods and services as the dollar becomes with $0. There are many money grabs needed. The more the merrier. Just do it where people can afford it.

Last week I was struggling with sharing my main computer's resources with 3 other windows 11 machines. I used ChatGPT to navigate the details and got it done under the AI's direction. It all works now.

Then it hit me after the AI offered me the equivalent of a network engineering and Windows 11 systems administration set of courses, giving me the number of hours it thought it would take me to learn it, and so forth. I remember the Win 11 sys admin knowledge was estimated at 1000 hours. (wow). But treating it like a job, at 40 hours a week, that's 25 weeks. Less than half a year. Hmmmm....

Anyway, it occurs to me that the AI could be asked to do this entry-level education to prep newcomers for working the job for the employer that sponsors the employee's training. If the AI costs just $22 / month as my ChatGPT subscription does, then is that not cheap training?

I'm seeing a training revolution on all levels in the works. K-12 could possibly be done as homeschooling far more effectively than what was rolled out during COVID. Students would have to show up at a school only for things that absolutely couldn't be done at home, like Physical Education and things requiring a laboratory to work. And bringing back auto shop and vocational training could be greatly enhanced by AI under the direction of subject matter experts, such as actual mechanics and factory floor workers in the vocational sector, to greatly expand industrial America.

I had no reason to speculate the upsides of data centers until last week when I was offered an educational course by an AI that springs from a data center somewhere. Whaddaya think? Is the AI revolution as totally amazing as it looks to me now? It looks to me like it could dwarf the industrial revolution.

Well, I don't think its irrelevant. I learned years ago that the US has power outages regularly, and much of the developed world, such as Europe, does not. Europeans coming here and experiencing this are appalled. We should be appalled, but are used to it. There's really no excuse, it just isn't that hard, other than being short on generating power. We need to build more of those over a more diverse area so we don't need quite so much long distance transmission.

You can work with AI models, that's great, but there's folks that are better at working with their hands, and factory jobs are their pot of gold. Manufacturing pays blue-collar folks better wages than almost anything else they can do. There's lots of them, so if we can get the manufacturing ramped up here, the labor participation rate will also go way up, there'll be lots more people with lots more money, and they'll pay lots more taxes, and maybe get our economy out of deficit spending, and maybe even start paying down the debt. We have to do this, or the economy will literally crash and burn. We're on a path over a cliff, and I don't think AI models is going to turn the wagon, you need stuff that the non-laboratory workers can make good coin at too.

Yeah, I'm ancient, but personally remember the 60's, and prosperity was there, and it was because of manufacturing. The income taxes basically nuked the manufacturing, and are the reason for the rust belt. Get rid of them and maybe we have a chance for prosperity for everybody, not just the lab rats or the coding geeks.

Ding, ding, ding! Winner winner, chicken dinner.

The economy is going to have to start coughing up real cash. But it is hard to do when the country gets flooded with 20 million poor people who will say "Si" to any low-ball, dirt-bag wage, while the other side of the coin is the heavy industrial jobs that left the country in the 80's and 90;s, and took big fat blue-collar paychecks with them.

We need a complete turnaround on several fronts, my personal candidate to effect them is the FairTax, but you've heard that from me before. Rocket engines on the economy, etc., etc. but I believe its true.

But this "service jobs" bulls*** of retailing and anything except building something is not going to pull the country up by the bootstraps and provide a high-wage society that CAN provide the taxes necessary, without oppression, to nuke the deficit and then start rolling back the debt. Build it and they will come. Manufacture. And manufacture some more, until we get back to the 60's where 1 paycheck supported the whole family. I think it can be done, but not by offering the public crap wages. They need to be great wages, that cause the individual to be able to buy, buy, buy, and under the FairTax, the buying is what's taxed, only the non-impoverished can do it, and so no poor person pays a penny of FairTax but it will provide a way out of the current mess. USA becomes the manufacturing world's tax haven, foreign business executives injure themselves in the stampede to build (untaxed) factories in the USA, and then employ Americans at decent wages that spend on baubles and balance the budget. Oh, and they don't "leave the workforce" because their crap-wage job won't pay for the car, gas, and child-care to be able to do it.

"You know, like every one else in government."

Not everyone else in government was Secretary of State, where lots of classified got routed into her "server in a closet." Of course that is "insecure" and an actual violation of the espionage act, and no, you don't have to break those laws intentionally, its more like negligent homicide when you don't take proper care when wielding a weapon or driving a car without due regard for safety. You don't have to intend to violate the espionage act, you can do it just by being careless with classified.

So, it was not like some gov't employee not in the classified world using his private server for gov't business, this was "classified stuff." That was the difference.

No, I wouldn't think of getting on the highway without fastening my seat belt. I sometimes, very slowly, navigate a parking lot at McDonald's because I'm just driving to the trash can to deposit my drive-thru bag for the food I received, and am going to get out of the car within the next 150 feet. Otherwise, seat belt every time. Its air bags I object to having to pay for. Have never been in a situation where they would have been an advantage, and that includes 62 years of driving.

Also, folks seem to drive into deep water completely without the help of a map of any sort.

Yeah, other cars also have rear windows that are absent or useless, like the 1963 Corvette "Split Window" coupe that also could not be used as emergency egress. But there's no reason to be planning more such cars. And rear-view cameras and displays are a good thing, but they don't have to replace the rear window completely.

You just drove into a lake. The car is going down nose-first. The bystanders would like to rescue you, but that rear access that is still above water for the moment is not available.

...to the benefit of the American people.

The FairTax is essentially a luxury tax on new goods and services sold at retail.

The poor pay $0 FairTax.

The FairTax completely abolishes ALL the income taxes - personal, payroll, corporate, capital gains, self-employment, gift, alternative minimum, estate, all of them.

Prices of American-made good fall by 18% - 22% due to being free of the income taxes during their manufacture.

Prices of foreign goods do not fall at all.

The FairTax exclusive rate of 30% is applied to both the domestic manufactured products and the foreign manufactured products.

The domestic product ends up at about the same price as it was before. The foreign product ends up about 30% higher.

The world's business executives injure themselves in a stampede to build factories in the tax-free USA.

Much higher paying factory jobs raise the wages of Americans dramatically, while the burger restaurants and big box retailers raise wages just to pry some help off the factory floor.

The much richer American people happily become bauble-buyers of more expensive things, accelerating the collection of the FairTax.

The FairTax raises revenue to be able to nuke the deficit, then begins to pay down the debt.

And that's the ONLY way I can see that the debt ever has a chance to be paid, since there's nothing that we can similarly cut to balance the budget without killing a lot of folks. Medicare and Social Security cuts would kill a lot of folks, and they're the only things that cost enough to nuke the deficit.

In Michigan's upper Peninsula, one out to build their data center in a waterproof tube, submerge it in lake Superior, and never worry about cooling it again.

"Require closed-loop cooling instead of evaporative."

Then you get big fans that sound like a WW2 propellor-driven 4-engine bomber making racket 24/7/365 as actual fans force the not-all-that-cool air (here in Texas, anyway, where ambient can be 106 degrees Mid July to late September) and drive everyone absolutely over the edge.