I don’t dispute the stats. I think you are trying to convince me of the usefulness of a rail network. That’s unnecessary. I already think that.

Keeping in mind how car focused the US is, I don’t think they would tunnel through the Appalachians or run track over the Rockies today if somebody hadn’t thought to build out a rail network more than a century ago. Because that’s a counterfactual statement, it’s only an opinion.

Sensitive? WTF do you mean sensitive? I’m not sensitive. Thank you for rage baiting with us today.

Let me say up front that I’m very much in favor of democratic socialism. When I now try to disabuse you of two points in your comment, it’s not for ideological reasons. It’s more of a gut feeling about how politics, and especially politics in the US works.

Mandani works in NYC. A politician like that wouldn’t work in Wisconsin or Louisiana. Probably not even in California. That is not to say people wouldn’t benefit from more left leaning politics in those places. But they wouldn’t get elected into high enough offices in sufficient numbers to drive change. There is the US hangover from the cold war that reflexively makes anything with socialism a turnoff for the poorly educated masses (the irony!). And the power of religious belief, especially monotheistic religions, favors right wing authoritarians. The Midwest is too religious for its own good. NYC is the outlier.

MAGAs don’t vote on track record. It’s vibe based and that vibe is obnoxiously trying to own their opponents. The fact that 47 is ruining the US"s standing in the world, the economy, and all unwritten political norms that had underpinned the republic are not as important as fucking with the libs. 47 may be at the end of his political career, somebody is going to take over and continue on this path. You can’t fight feelings with facts. And you can’t drive change without getting enough socialists into office everywhere.

yet many a European would take issue with your US centric viewpoint on rail :)

That’s because virtually nobody got rich off of trains in Europe. They would have all been reasonably regulated and their incomes reasonably taxed. And rail was used to connect places in Europe that already existed and often already had roads connecting them. There was no “wilderness to conquer.” That’s what sets the US railroad apart from their old world counterparts. And as far as cargo is concerned, a lot of it may run on rails. But that’s because it’s already there. They wouldn’t build a new network today. And the infrastructure that survived this far isn’t exactly in good shape.

I agree with you. I still think somebody is going to do something with the compute capacity that hasn’t burned up in cycles to train models to create Yoda with a six-fingered hand. And somebody will find something worth doing with these models. It probably won’t be search, or writing, or making graphics for your PowerPoint. But I think video creation, be it for Hollywood or video games, will be here to stay and be potentially profitable. There will be a use in coding although probably no profit. I’m still hoping for good uses in medicine and pharmacology as well. And as aids to people with disabilities there are probably very good use cases as well. And they are the richest people on this planet so there is a Ferengi level of profit there. /s, of course.

The digitization of books will be useful as well.

In the end, the ROI for so-called AI will be inked in red. And the US will enter a recession, which will give us MAGA 3.0. So invasion of Greenland ca. 2034?

A thing that gets overlooked often is that being the first in a field is often quite bad for business. Apple learned that lesson. They didn’t make the first smartphone, tablet, or mp3 player. They waited for other people to be first and then iterated well on that.

The people who financed laying the train tracks that became the economic arteries of North America (along with robbing more land and pushing out the people who already lived there) didn’t become rich. The second generation that ran logistics and passengers was way more likely to become rich. They didn’t have to pay for the infrastructure but they benefited from it being there.

OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, the son of the South African emerald miners, Google, etc. They’re just laying tracks right now. The conglomerates that don’t rely only on so-called AI have a chance to survive. All the other ones are going to run out of money and/or get bought and taken over. The real winner of the industry probably hasn’t even made it to the starting line.

Training models takes a big investment and then becomes difficult to protect against people who will just try to copy and steal it. In a way, I think world history will look at the US as the first generation track layers. You built the data centers at ridiculous cost, both in hardware and negative consequences for people and the environment, and then get out-iterated by all the people who didn’t want to jump on to the hype train three years ago or couldn’t foot the bill at the time. The cost decreases the longer you wait. US companies think they are investing into future long-tern licensing agreements to use their yet unknown products. I think that’s dumb and isn’t going to happen.

I think Apple will benefit from their lean back and wait approach. They will look at where this stuff consolidates into something useful and then just buy it.

Edit: Forgot this point: most of the train tracks have become redundant in the age of airplanes. The infrastructure is decaying. Data centers may become overgrown train tracks faster than we expect.

Seriously, I would stop doing that if I were you. Not for the esthetic or because there is inherently anything wrong with doing that. You’re going to become bycatch when people look to catch bots and sloppers in a wide net.

I would go for your favorite expletive. So when you see the mess he made and cuss he’ll come and look at you. Probably with disdain.

Because they’re normal. Next question.

Any post formatted like that comes straight out of an LLM. No user, no matter how dedicated or how mad, would take the time to format headers and bullet points.

Reposting stuff from reddit and posting whatever the LLM spat out. As far as I’m concerned, you are a contributing factor to a stagnant user base here.

Why should there be? Who needs this?

Crypto may be the closest to this idea. And it gets used a lot for speculation, drug trade, and to finance the North Korean economy. Nobody is looking at that thinking this is the future.

Maybe they should cancel that show too. It would give the host more time to participate in various comedy festivals around the world.

Asked and answered.

Your eyeballs are unprotected for the printed ads. Your browser needs a couple of plugins and they’re gone.

It’s a comedy movie parodying the stylistic exaggeration that is part of the Bond movies.

It’s going to be a hard math problem to get this bomb to go off near molten lava but not in it. The bomb will probably not be able to generate its full destructive potential if it melts first. Also, there is more atmospheric pressure down there and we didn’t build bombs for that. But even if you accounted for all that, worldwide eruptions sound like a stretch. The shock wave in air of a 50 kiloton explosion would probably be in the 10 mile range. That’s going to be lower in a thick liquid medium and a not insignificant part of that energy would also want to travel back up the drilled shaft. So this will probably affect an area of the world but far from all of it. And there is no guarantee it would work or be instantaneous. Pressure buildups that lead to eruptions can take ages. It’s a bad plan.

Sole custody? Not a big chance unless the other parent becomes criminal, sick to the point where they can no longer take care of the child, or worse.

Japan is embarking on a journey of allowing split custody. That concept is new though because we love a law with tradition that goes back to the Heian era. My layman guess would be they will somehow exclude foreign passport holders without PR, just on principle.

Forgive me for being this blunt: your friend is effed. They didn’t get their kid a passport. They are at the mercy of the Japanese courts. And even if they had the passport and could ‘go on vacation’ to the US, there is a very good chance the US courts would eventually send the kid back. There is international law at play to prevent child abductions, chief among it the Hague convention, to which the US and finally also Japan are signatories. Your friend’s best chance is a stable life in Japan, a good lawyer, and hopefully no marks on the record that diminishes their chances. Naiveté isn’t a defense. If the friend didn’t know that if the marriage went south this could be the outcome that’s regrettable but also the toughest of luck.

Also, we only get half the story on hearsay. The other parent’s story might paint a very different picture.

What happens when you cross a sock with a puppet?

Do we have to retread this one? What’s next? People drowning in UK puddles and superhero personality critique?

Personally, I look to the user side for lack of intelligence.

Out of interest, why do you need a whole app for that? What does it do that you couldn’t do on search?

They probably looked at who users burner phones and quickly realized it’s mostly people cheating on their spouses or people of the criminal variety. None of these groups are going to start a political movement. And cheaters gonna cheat and one more obstacle for the criminal folks isn’t a bad thing. Tourists are a rounding error.

Sure, in the past we had phone booths and boxes. The majority of landlines were registered to a name, a business, or an institution. There isn’t really a long established right to have a burner number. People used to voluntarily list their names and numbers in a book. And no cheating farmer Bob had a secret line put in the barn so he could talk to his side piece.

I’m going to guess the Aussie rules apply to most of the countries we group under the label western. And there is a danger that they harvest your data but it is more likely a government requirement to register ID. Like with private car ownership in the US as well if I’m not mistaken. It’s not wildly outlandish as a concept.

Don’t look into what they make you do if you want to own a firearm.