gandalfian

You would think google, microsoft and apple would be having kittens over this. How will any government or large corporation trust their goods and services if they can be disabled at will because the USA government takes offence to you, or someone in your department. Good for linux I guess but pain for the rest of us.

An official iphone screen for self repair costs more than my entire android phone. That's why people still steal them even locked and unusable. My miele washing machine will last twenty years, possibly indefinitely but every seven years it needs a repair costing £300 from Miele... Repairable is a start, economically repairable is trickier.

Writing this on a 2010 pc bought cheap in 2012. Upgraded ram, ssd added, windows 7 to windows 10 with extended updates. Yes it's time to replace but they do last.

To get paid for export you will nearly always need an MCS number to show it was installed by accredited professionals. Doing it yourself, or by your local electrician or plug in solar is not something they accept. It's a bit of a racket, but in practice pay up for the professional install or no export payments.

In Uk, If an old (rare) mechanical meter the meter will go backwards, the ideal. If a dumb digital meter the meter will simply pause counting up. If a smartmeter again the import reading will pause but a separate export reading will count up, for which you get no credit or debit but its nice to know. Ideally as battery prices drop you end up buying a battery that soaks up any surplus for later and so you don't lose any back to the grid. If you pay up for a commercially installed solar you can get paid for what you export but with plug in solar you just give it away.

Modern wireless mice from logitech and microsoft last for a year or two on a pair of aa batteries. There is no point making them rechargeable any more. You can always use rechargeable aa nihms if you really want to, but personally I just have 50p of alkaline aa's and in two years I will have to change them again. Some things do get better :)

Equator, poorest countries with 12 hours of sun 365 days a year. If batteries really fall in price it may rapidly have the cheapest, cleanest energy on the planet. The future of energy intensive industries may be Africa, which would be nice, they could use a break. Not to mention the cheapest place to launch your rockets into orbit.

Weirdly themselves. Makes my head hurt but the central bank, the social security fund and some other bits of US government basically own most of the national debt. Then it's the Japanese, British, Chinese and Warren Buffet. But less than you would guess.

Of course that was back when a trillion dollars was worth something.

People leave out that when the wholesale electricity prices are above the Government guaranteed price the Government makes a profit on selling the wind electricity. So in this example when the grid is full to the brim with wind energy but there is still a demand for last resort gas backup generators the wholesale price of electricity must be high and the government is minting money from the wind turbines, even while paying some to turn off... This is not always the case. But it would be interesting to hear, taking into account the high electricity prices since the Ukraine energy crisis, how much the Government makes from selling the power at a profit and renting the sea floor to the turbines, minus the subsidies paid when prices are low or the wind turbines have to be turned off. It's hard to make a judgement on the economics of it all without knowing this. We may be paying far less for subsidised wind power than we think.

"The “pop” won’t be a single day like a stock market crash. It’ll be a gradual cooling as unrealistic promises fail, capital tightens, and only profitable or genuinely innovative players remain."

(This comment was written by ChatGPT)