Yeah! Go for it!
I'm curious to see how you'll haul away 19,600 gallons of corn syrup, 3,900 bushels of grain, 100 tons of random auto parts, 80 tons of paper reams, 70 tons of logs, 13,000 gallons of ammonia (or other dangerous chemicals), and the various other things that typically get shipped via rail these days.
You might get lucky and find a boxcar full of canned goods 👍
...or maybe even actual cars but... How would you get them off the train without the necessary equipment/track setup? 🤔
Everyone's joking but this is a serious problem. Imagine you're a billionaire and someone wants to assassinate you. The would-be assassin could figure out when you have a doctor's appointment (or similar) and force a train to get stuck, blocking their route.
It would leave the billionaire stuck in traffic with no escape until the train(s) started moving again. An entire cavalcade of security personnel would also be stuck (if they had one).
Aside: It could also work for robbing something like a Brinks truck but let's be honest: In this dystopian world it's more likely that this vulnerability would be used to rob a food shipment 🙄
Turning people's homes into "gardens" is not positive news. It's just one step away from Soylent Green.
Disaster preparedness is socialism!
To summarize: Texas allows itself to be governed via right wing ideology and right wing ideology makes for piss poor disaster preparedness.
Expecting your government to do anything at all to protect people from disasters is literally the opposite of right wing ideology. Disaster preparedness—in the form of warning systems and building regulations—are implementations socialism (and environmentalism).
If you're a conservative (or libertarian), little girls dying in floods every few years is your ideal scenario. That's literally what you believe in! That it's not the government's job to prevent such things.
And let's be honest: If you're conservative you probably don't believe in global warming either so this is just an "act of God" that no one could've predicted (except science did predict this). Clearly, God is punishing those little girls (or their parents) for... Living in Texas?
The US is not "openly bankrolling" any AI companies. The closest thing would be OpenAI's recent contract with the military:
https://www.theverge.com/news/688041/openai-us-defense-department-200-million-contract
Whereas China is definitely funding AI efforts in their country because they're communist (sort of). That's literally how communism works: The government funds stuff.
China isn't really communist in the traditional sense but they definitely use government funds to prop up business they feel will give the country a strategic advantage. They do this directly (here's a check to pay people) and indirectly (we'll subsidize all shipping for your business and make sure you get sweetheart deals with other businesses you rely on).
The Chinese government is in the business of picking winners and losers in the market and they're open about it. It's not a secret. That's literally how their government is setup.
The US has ways of picking winners but they're not nearly as direct and there's a whole lot of rules that must be followed or competitors will sue and win. Then the whole process falls apart.
TL;DR: You're directly wrong and you're framing the story wrong as well.
Aside: If OpenAI goes bankrupt after wasting billions of rich investor dollars the citizens of the US will not have lost billions as a result. Whereas in China...
Depends on your CPU and whatever else you have in your PC (e.g. is your cooler a beast too? Do you have six spinning disks? etc).
Generally speaking, 750W should be fine if you're using a boring air cooling setup with an SSD or two.
Oh man, the parallels with history here are strong...
Back in the day companies would use government to crack down on things like union strikes. So the unions started working with the Mafia for protection.
This didn't work out well for the companies (executives getting carried off, tortured, and executed... That sort of stuff) so the government came up with a compromise: Strong labor laws.
Now we have the government itself violating it's own laws (Bill of Rights), kidnapping harmless people, sending them to faraway prisons to become slaves. Hooking up with organized crime seems like a logical path 🤷
...as in: WTF did you think was going to happen‽
We need to pass legislation that requires all AI services be powered by their own, renewable energy on-site. Then no one can complain and we'll reduce pollution at the same time.
If the AI services complain we can collectively respond with, "oh yeah? How's that AGI comin? Surely it can figure out a way to power itself."
Of course, that's when the AI companies start hiring humans to sit in energy harvesting pods all day 🤷
These shoes will claim they're victims of a crime and they're right!
I know, right? Why send my BBQ data to the cloud when I can just cook with a handful of GPUs, locally? To start the grill you just ask the animated waifu to dance and sing a random, AI-generated song that matches your taste in music. Then the fans spin up and send scrumptious GPU heat into the grill, cooking up a delicious hallucination where your animated waifu sings, "That looks yummy! Yummy yummy yummy! Hai hai hai!"
I see the picture of the girl... I assume she's going to play Link? Perfect match. She looks just like him 👍
I assume the guy will be Ganon? 😁