It's mystifying as to why the United States is firmly trying to pull in the opposite direction and leaning hard on coal and other fossil fuels. Is it because the US is the largest oil producer in the world now? But even that doesn't make sense as it simply does not have the refining capacity needed to handle the volume of extracted crude.

Why would the US deliberately risk getting behind on the first major shift in the energy landscape in a hundred years?

As multiple commenters have pointed out, this is actually not new(e.g you get registered when you get your driver's license).

I wonder why flagging brigade on HN has such a thin skin when it comes to anything even remotely critical of the current govt.

In this case, every executive is terrified of being "left out" in the AI race. As we saw with the mass layoffs across companies, most of CEO decision making is just adhering to herd behavior. So it is literally better for execs to have shoveled a shit ton of money into 'strategic' AI initiatives and have them fail than potentially deal with the potentially remote chance of some other exec or company succeeding with 'AI enabled transformation'.

What makes it even more fun is that nobody really has a good understanding of how to measure the ROI of AI. Hence we have people burning a lot of money due to FOMO and no easy way of measuring the outcome, which is usually how the foundations for good Ponzi schemes are laid.

This is unlikely to end well. However, as usual, it's us, the common plebs, who will suffer regardless of outcome.