manxu

Population density is not really a problem: Most of the country is virtually empty, but there are a series of urban agglomerations that have incredibly high density overall. The North-East corridor (DC to Boston, more or less) is the most obvious one, but Chicago and environment or Coastal California are great options, too. The “secret” reason why it’s not happening is public indifference and corporate sabotage. A campaign of decades of worsening public transportation has made people convinced that a high speed train would be just for poor people, which they imagine to be someone else. Also, eminent domain land seizures are slow, environmental impact studies slower, and both force costly changes from original plan that the public hears about as cost-overruns. Final nail in the coffin: in America, for bizarre reasons, passenger rail has lower priority than freight rail. The freight rail companies don’t want to give up the privilege, and obviously you can’t have a high speed service wait on freight trains bumbling by.

You are so mean! I had just stopped crying over not getting the new version of OS/2 the other week!

Very, very fair points. I wondered sometimes why no enterprising manufacturer simply took an existing ICE car and made an EV conversion kit. Like a conversion kit for a 2010 Honda Civic, take out the ICE engine etc. and replace it all with electric. That's the car we want.

The high gas prices may have added fuel to the fire, but the best news here is that used EVs are growing in popularity. That is a consequence of us finding out batteries don’t degrade as fast as we first imagined, which makes used EVs a lot more interesting. In the short term, that kills the market for new EVs, since used ones were so dirt cheap. In the long run, the resale value of new EVs will be much more stable, eliminating the last downside they had. (Obviously, many car makers saw the short term pain and gave up on the entire market. That is of course because car maker CEOs are absolutely brilliant people with foresight and strategic thinking. Just kidding: they occupy the only category of jobs that should absolutely be replaced by AI.)

Oh you are right! I must have had an episode of math dyslexia!

It feels like the factors of authentication discussion misses one important aspect: can the factor be replayed. Passwords can be replayed indefinitely, while the email links you get or the OTP token only work for a short period of time. I remember it from the bad days when I used LastPass. Suddenly I got a notification that the place had been compromised and I had to suddenly change hundreds of passwords. 90% of them were for sites that didn't even exist any longer, but sifting through the long, long list to go change passwords was more work than I wanted to do. Don't have to do that if I need to use a one-time token via Aegis or email! I do agree, though, that for low risk sites, username/password is totally fine.

A whole NOVEL in 57 words!

Honestly, tulips were a better investment than Tesla or OpenAI. In fact, the continued success of the latter two tells you by itself there is something deeply, seriously wrong with the stock markets and the economy as a whole.