With $3500 being the entry point, you'll have to give up some of your other addictions to afford it. How much coke, crack, or weed could you get for $3500?

OK, let's run with that and see what we find. Let's start with offshore wind. You can't just put it anywhere; you need areas where the winds are favorable for power generation and catastrophic storms are rare. So the entire coastline isn't your oyster. Several offshore wind projects are already in effect. Why aren't more? Could be because coastal residents hate them. Yup, the same environmentalist flag wavers who decry nuclear, coal, oil, and natural gas are all in favor of wind power...so long as it isn't anywhere near them. And since you need power generation relatively close to power consumption to keep transmission losses low, you end up needing wind farms near major population centers on the coastline. This runs afoul of these same folks, not to mention issues with shipping lanes and fisheries, none of which want giant turbine towers jutting out of the water. So the problem here isn't technological or economical; it's political, also known as hypocrisy.

What about onshore? Well, much the same applies. Wind farms need lots of real estate. Land in the middle of Bumfuck, Nowhere is very cheap but it's a long way from the big cities who want to consume that power. Even then, you can't plop a turbine down just anywhere; it needs to be where the wind is. If you put those two factors (wind availability, affordable land) together, that "massive resource" you mentioned isn't anywhere near massive anymore. Indeed, many of the economically viable ones are either already built or in the process of being built. And you still have the issue of local residents generally despising turbine towers all over the place, not to mention environmental groups complaining about noise, killing of endangered birds, and the ecological disruption of tower construction and maintenance.

So, you asked a question and now you have the answer, showing this is not as simple as it's being made out to be. Sure, this could be done but you'd have to tell a lot of wealthy, powerful landowners to fuck off (good luck since they own the politicians), you'd have to tell the environmentalists to fuck off, you'd have to tell ports providing vital imports/exports to fuck off, and you'd have to tell fisheries providing you vital food to fuck off. I don't know about you but living in a country where the government has the power to tell that many people to fuck off is not something I find attractive, carbon neutral or no carbon neutral.

Name some and I'll tell you. Most have fully exploited all the feasible hydro, the oldest and most obvious renewable. Geothermal is only usable in areas of volcanic activity. Solar is best where there's lots of sun but few people live in deserts, making transmission losses the major problem. That leaves wind, which requires...well...windy areas and lots of acreage which is not feasible everywhere. And let's not forget environmentalists who scream for renewables but absolutely refuse to allow them in their areas.

If renewables were cheap, effective, and easy, everyone would have them already. Since they don't, the obvious conclusion is it's not as simple as you're making it out to be.

Each of these countries is uniquely positioned to take advantage of local, natural renewables. Some of them -- like Iceland -- also benefit from extremely sparse population densities. This is not the case for the rest of the globe. The areas where this is feasible are extremely limited.

Developing nations are least equipped to pay the higher costs associated with this concept. If you offer them cheap power from a coal plant versus expensive power from a renewable plant, they'll go for the cheap solution 100% of the time.

It's worth checking out one of Enron's questionable ventures in India. They built a power plant in one of the poorest areas of the country only to discover the electricity was too expensive for the citizens to buy. The whole thing went bust because people let the idea get ahead of the actual, real economics of the idea.

You need to understand the difference between peak load and base load power generation. Wind, solar, and tidal are all subject to unpredictable variation, and storing unused power from these sources is either very expensive, very inefficient, or both. You need something to reliably generate a certain constant baseline when it's cloudy, not windy, snowing, etc. The only current zero carbon solution to this equation is nuclear.

Here's the problem: your monitor is 2d, the world most humans directly perceive is 3D. Anything you look at on a monitor has been projected and looks weird. There's your problem, a VR headset solves that. It is a new display technology capable of providing 3-dimentional, animated images accurately. If you have used such a headset you instantly realize it's a big step forward in display technology. It can be more, everyone is offering more. But this is enough.

Yes but a big step forward that allows what to take place? Just because you can browse Amazon in 3D does not mean you're going to have a demonstrably better shopping experience. It's not enough that it is better. It must be better while being practical and affordable.

I recall, working on HDTV in the early days, everyone saying it's going to bomb because nobody needs more than standard def, it's good enough. Nobody can perceive pixels that small as it is (yes, this was said). We built it, people bought it. Standard Def TVs are now hard to find, HDTVs are *much* better to look at. Smart Phones, I remember wanting one of those since the mid-90s. People kept saying nobody would want to have a computer in their pocket, computers are hard to use and nerdy. They built them, we even had a windows phone, and it was indeed hard to use and nerdy and crashed a lot. Apple figured that out though. Now everyone has a smart phone of one sort or the other.

To use your SDTV vs. HDTV example, there was definitely a market for HD because it was demonstrably clearer and sharper than SD. Ditto for 4K. Now we're nudging towards 8K and there are few adopters. Why? Because 4K is generally good enough. That may shift to 8K someday, but then what about 16K? 32K? At some point you get diminishing returns. It may be better but there is little value in the better to offset the increase in cost.

Case in point, look at how the Oculus (I won't dignify it by calling it Meta) Quest 2 took off. Prior attempts by everyone else focused on $1,000+ headsets. They sold poorly despite being quite good (for the time). Then along comes the Quest 2 and they flew off the shelves. Why? It was "good enough" at a price point that was nearly an impulse buy.

I predict this $3k Apple gadget will appeal to those with more money than sense, especially those who love wallowing in the narcissistic pleasure of having the latest cool gadget that nobody else can afford. Other than that, it will go nowhere.

While I get your point that there are certain "protected classes" of people who will always be allowed to get away with it, that doesn't mean people with clout are immune to Ofcom's predations. It just ensures one side of the political spectrum gets hammered. This should be a terrifying thought to anyone who values freedom.

I'm reminded of a passage from Atlas Shrugged where a politician is explaining the purpose of laws. They're constructed such that it is impossible to legally run a profitable, successful business, hence every successful businessman is a lawbreaker. The government then picks and chooses who it will (or won't) prosecute on political whims and favoritism. Hence the government exercises de facto control over the entire economy -- and by extension the lives of its citizens -- without being granted any Constitutional authority to do so.

Even better, of Ofcom goes after someone, costing them millions to defend themselves and risking permanent damage to their public reputation for being accused of a crime, and Ofcom loses the case, will Ofcom be held responsible for their overzealous prosecution and making the accused whole again?

I'm not holding my breath. A law such as this gives Ofcom (another) gun they can point at the head of anyone they choose knowing they never have to pay for any mistakes made along the way. The mere threat of Ofcom having this ability will cause companies to toe Ofcom's line regardless of whether they're in actual violation or not. If Ofcom gets to decide what constitutes "harm" to a child, how long before it's extended to things like "mean words" or "malicious glances" or (even dare I speak it) "unapproved thoughts"?

If ad hominem attacks are your only defense, you realize you're on thin ice. Insults are the last refuge of those without a winning argument. You'll note that at no time have I stooped to namecalling or insults. I don't have to. I'm asking a very simple question that any logical, rational, objective person should be able to answer.

The only silly game being played here is you consistently -- and tellingly -- refusing to answer a very simple, obvious, straightforward question. If you wanted to prove a hypothetical laptop belonged to a hypothetical person, what evidence would you consider valid?

One wonders why you refuse to answer. Is it because you have a standard that, if revealed, would incriminate someone you don't want incriminated? Or that you refuse to state that, for ideological reasons, no amount of evidence would convince you and hence you're not rationally considering the situation?

And again you deflect, so I'll simplify this for you.

Forget for a moment the presence or absence of any evidence of any kind and kindly answer the question. What would constitute evidence of authenticity in your eyes? Surely you must have some standard. State it.

I'll note you evaded the question, so I'll ask again: what would constitute evidence of authenticity in your eyes?

The part you're missing is the government is not allowed to coerce or cooperate with a private entity to do what the government itself cannot. In this case, coercion was not required, as all the major players at Twitter were of the same political mindset (>96% Democrats according to political contributions) and were more than happy to cooperate wherever they could to help the Biden campaign do something that would be illegal if the Biden campaign did it.

If the mountains of evidence that are piled up all saying this is HB's real laptop aren't enough for you to agree it's his, what would be? You're intent on denying the authenticity regardless of every single factor to date showing it's his. So I throw down the gauntlet and ask you to definitively state what would constitute evidence of authenticity in your eyes.

Given the complete apathy of the "hard-hitting reporters" at the NY Times, LA Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, etc. in even looking into this story, the lack of "news sources" is a feature, not a bug. When the investigators refuse to investigate, this is the result.

And if the story won't die on its own, let's get Twitter involved to actively censor it! And then you can have Facebook censor it too, citing Twitter's censoring it! And then you can have the news outlets fervently point out it's "not a story worth covering" (a la NPR) because nobody is covering it! And if anybody asks why they're not covering it, just get about 50 former Intelligence officials to pen a letter implicating it as "Russian disinformation!"

It's an unholy circle of ass covering is what it is. This kind of stuff used to be the butt of jokes about Soviet-style government working hand in glove with Pravda. I would wager everything I have that if the parties were reversed and one of Trump's kids had left an incriminating laptop at a repair shop, every news outlet in the country would have jumped on it like flies on shit, because that's exactly what happened with the (now-debunked) Russia Collusion story.