Just a serval who gets into all sorts of furry shenanigans.
The one way a company can avoid that is to not go publicly traded in the first place. Problem is there’s a huge a mount of incentive to go publicly traded - specifically, it’s a huge boost to cash-on-hand, which can be crucial for expanding a business - so most corporations will basically do so without batting an eyelash at it. It’s a lot slower to build a company solely from net profits and private investors. But the cost of faster growth is a loss of control of the company.
From a technological point, yes. That being said, there are some complications. The US runs double-stacked intermodal freight so clearance is a concern, first of all. It’s doable, in fact India has many electrified lines that allow for double-stacked intermodal freight, but it does add a little to the cost and effort. The second issue is, unfortunately, cost, but not because it’s outright “too expensive”. Rather, it would eat too much into the short-term quarterlies of the various publicly traded rail companies that own a vast majority of the US’s rail lines during the installation. And as publicly traded companies, even if one of the major rail companies wanted to spend the money to electrify, they would get sued by their shareholders for doing so because there’s no immediate return on profits. And the final issue? NIMBYs already hate rail as-is, they’d hate the overhead lines even more.
So, yeah, a lot of challenges to electrification unique to the US, almost all of them political in nature. It would be really nice to put in electrified rail again (late PRR and New Haven were almost fully electrified but most of that was ripped out after the Penn Central merger. Seriously, everyone likes to rag on New Haven for screwing that up but honestly the evidence all points to the New York Central’s management team being the real culprits).
Oh good. An AI search bot replaces… an AI search bot. 😒
Well, at least SearchGPT is open source. And the fact that it’s operated by a nonprofit org rather than a big corporate entity could be the kicker here, there’s no incentive to favor business partners or advertising clients. So I guess we might actually see an improvement here.
Could be something as simple as computers just being screwy sometimes. Or something as unlikely but still precedented as a bit-flip caused by an excited electron causing something important to actually be affected.
Knowing how important the site is to the fandom, I’d be surprised if anyone lets it go under.
That being said, as a precaution, a PixelFed instance attached to pawb.fun and pawb.social might be nice to have.