At 1/3 yield, electrolyze for Hydrogen has parity with Diesel at about 150-200 €/MWh. This is about twice what a Europe in energy crisis pays per wattage.
Now mind you, that is not why Toyota or a lot of Japanese companies care: They care because they know they are one fun happy global ship war away from being completely barred from using Petrochemicals at any scale.

This create a interesting paradox: Technically one of the Japanese companies could foot the R&D bill to make this technology competitive on the potential edge it has, but the core interest is just to keep a patent pool and production going so Japan don't have to deal with the worst consequences of WW3.
The end result is that we each decade gets some vehicle/production based of Hydrogen, which go and die in the news cycle because its just there as auxiliary potential technology.

Lossy transcoding means each time you save/convert it, you have to destroy data.
You have a webpage. The webpage shows a jpeg. And it shows a second generation jpeg in a few different resolutions to save on bandwidth. Some image service caches it, creating a third generation jpeg. The image service can leech of other image services, creating a cycle.
The 11th gen jpeg is now posted on Facebook which.... converts it into the facebook optimized version of jpeg on top of some losses.

Now.... the original webpage goes down. The original imagehost as well. How many generations into the cycle will the jpeg be when you fetch it from a random source? In the wild web today you can see a lot of images that has strange blur on it, which is even more strange if its made via cobbling together crop outs. If you are lucky they are sourced from something like a webcomic, which means the original after 2-3 generation losses can be sourced. If not, you can quickly run into 30th or 50th generation images.

As the poster said: Just fucking enforce the overtime payment laws.
There is a reason why contractors usually bill by the hour, or by the workday. Its to ensure that if its a nothingburger, they still get paid for the commut and time allocation.

SMS/email to check if somebody can cover that Larry has taken sick leave? Bill an hour overtime Zoom call outside of work hours? Bill two.
Communication after 18 in the evening? Bill it for overtime, and don't process it until the next work day.
Once t hat is enforced, you can start hunting for violations. Or start carefully at state level micromanaging allowed OT, or even set yearly quotas that can't be exceeded.

Google Analytics, and therefore Google Adservice. Not the god damn search engine that is getting more and more irrelevant each passing day as bot generates sited are not filtered out of the algorithm.
And you don't get what Facebook is used for or is in the present. It could potentially get replaced, but nothing in the ecosystem has anywhere near the entrenchment.
Microsoft might finally get toppled by Web 2.0, which for all intents and purposes finally arrived because of HTML5 and not back in 2004. But you still need a native desktop for actual application usage, and software still need to be compiled to run natively. Or nevermind the mountain of Win32 legacy, which by itself could be the actual deathknell to Windows by moving it to emulators or translation layers such as WINE.

What I will agree is that Amazon is used as a shorthand to avoid dealing with the fact there are LARGE regional differences in what you can get retail. Even more so once you start dealing with SA, or god forbid how extremely regional store chains are in Europe. Ebay fills a similar niche for used components, even more so for cross border trading.

We shall see. Now the NOK is inflating quite badly from buying local hydro power in what is essentially Euro, which means PPT gains could vanish. Everything in the economy is scaled off cheap hydro power, so within a year we are already seeing products increasing 20-50% because the supply chain is cumulatively getting horribly expensive, since the supply chain uses hydro power electricity to keep its value afloat.
Then:
All it takes is a few years where unionized workers gain 5-10% a year, where production owners take out 15-20%, and then Norway would be back to massive wealth discrepancy of the 20s and 30s.

That is without discussing HOW the inflation works. Cumulative production issues with electricity is one thing, but the complete lack of primary and secondary production outside of the oil fields and their suppliers of parts and labor means that what isn't the Norwegian west coast is a barren wasteland of trying to get government money to keep the local economies float with a few enterprises keeping some larger urban centers afloat.
You also now have most of the urban areas with zones where the only reasonable investment opportunity is housing, which long term is destroying PPT even more. This is aggravated by a lack of competing housing expansion to avoid investors setting the price by not building more supply, and a lack of public transport network to decrease the need for insane commute times via automobile.

Good gasoline has shelf life of about a year. But can go significantly longer with some good fuel filters and good seals on the gasoline tank.
10% ethanol + gasoline is closer to half a year. It also eats lawn mowers stored between seasons.
For in South America like Brazil i'd image its fully possible to fuel on rather high ethanol content, which do not have good shelf life.

For a rental service, i'd image that would boil down to topping up fuel tanks with alkylation type gasoline.

The viewpoint of the upper Japanese echelon is most likely: "But what happens if global trade stops, and we are then without access to the petroeconomy?"
To them this is most likely not about making a competitive technology, but to have a actual accessible backup in case things go wrong. And maybe find niche cases where there could be a global export market. And this to me seem to be the case why these stories pop in in very regular intervals: They want the expertise to remain relevant in case they need to crack the glass and use it.
So some byproduct being used, some cooperation, some relevant technology remains institutionalized, some headlines made. And we will get another one in a few years about something similar.

Or this is a long term hedge: in case energy production turns out to be cheap. But the hedge has been ongoing for so long that its unlikely.

Yes.
But this is a Teleco to Teleco issue. For phone calls you could simply just stop accepting non verified numbers. Or implement a solution where on dial the called persons phone has to call back on the end information to verify a correct information.

Bluntly put: This is a very trivial problem.

Electricity is still pegged to crude/LNG/coal/diesel in many part of the world as well. Even outside of these regions electricity is pegged proportional to those prices, for simple reasons like backup generators.

But as long as you can burn something in a larger generator and get significantly more effectivity than burning it in a car, the demand for energy won't budge. And cars isn't boats, railways or tractors. Or petrochemicals. Or heating.
I simply don't have any faith in the global economy leaving the oil economy until we do.

Bit more complicated than that. Even if the kids leave their home country to go abroad to earn a wage via a Bachelor or Masters... what happens down the line when the migrated country still lack core infrastructure or just labor pools to support the same career?
Wanting to go back to build your country is noble and all, but what do you do when the host country is still too barren to support actual industries or supply chains? Or the corruption means its not possible or feasible to run a export/import refinement enterprise.

Today:
As far as I am aware, 400kW CCS2 do not exist in the wild. While the Tesla network is currently in a state where you can just plot in a destination in the opposite end of Europe the software, and it will tell you where to stop at working chargers without significant coverage gaps
Just accept that CCS1 just like CHADEMO was a bad standard.

The far uncertain future:
?????

Because the assumption are that IF you are the author, you could instead edit the source material to remove data. But that isn't how mastering is done for text based documents.

Model Y and 3 both use the more modern 3 buttons on the outside of the seat side.
You didn't "wait" for that too happen unless you where allergic too fiddling until you found the buttons in their standard locations. And wheel isn't even located deep into the menu, and its logically grouped with the pedal acceleration modes alongside steering feedback. The same with actually entering the menu, since its logically grouped on what is a task bar, even following a vanilla windows style taskbar idea.

So no, you didn't need help. You got into a car with a very logical UI, and got scared of moving your hands to find buttons and levers, and then got scared of hitting buttons in the one area of the screen where the menu could even be. This is a type of car where the only horrible UI experience is that blinkers and backing blocks you from answering your handsfree, and only recently got a undocumented way to answer handsfree via the wheel.

A BEV with 500-600km range could be driven as a taxi and live off a beefy wall socket, and maybe do 2 shifts with low traffic.
The problem is when your local charging options is only a 50kwh located where you could grab lunch, or you have 150kwh charger that refuses to do more than 60kwh. I'd love 300kwh 800v, but that sounds exotic and non existing to me.
I'd image Model Y taking over the taxi market long term because of exactly this issue, because you might get away with driving to low charge, plugging it in, and taking a toilet break and s small sip of coffee before having enough juice to do another shift.

Bit more complex. Not enough medium apartments? Then you are stuck with small apartments that is useless.
Another effect is that if your apartment is too small, you are forced to sell it if your living situation change or you get kids. Or if you are forced to sell if you want a garage to run a startup out of a garage.

So a small apartmentt is basically useless, but its priced at market price so some other sucker can buy it.