In Maple Valley most of it from Grand Coulee Dam and from the reduction of power usage by more efficient appliances and heating/cooling of buildings, although a goodly amount is from their own generation. IIRC Amazon is the largest non-utility generator of renewable energy there is, with wind farms scattered about and solar installations on the roof of many (perhaps most now) of their million+ square foot fulfillment centers.

The folks doing the deliveries are contractors, it seems to be a pretty good deal for them. Amazon will subsidize their vehicle purchase, and give them access to AWS-based tools for things like HR, accounting, route management, and the like. Whether the contractors take them up on the subsidies and such is entirely up to them, as long as stuff gets delivered correctly. It sounds like the contractor in your area prefers to buy used vehicles and beat the crap out of them, good in the short run but probably more expensive in the long term. (I suspect you're in the southeastern US.)

We get a package every few day for one thing or another, in our area I think I've had one USPS delivery and one UPS delivery in the last three months. Everything else has been Amazon-labeled vehicles, at least one of them a Rivian.

It's been most of three decades since pretty much any company's stock price has had anything to do with reality. It's all speculation, Wall Street has become a casino for the richest gambling addicts on the planet.

As a Soviet general told writer Farley Mowat, "The difference between Soviet propaganda and American propaganda is that no no one believes ours."

Indeed. The whole subtext is "Be afraid! Be very afraid! Only we can keep you safe, so give us all your freedoms and money so we can keep them safe too!"

Americans generally don't realize we're the most propagandized people on the planet, mostly because the quality of the mind control emanating from the professional ad agencies is so good. Best mind control organizations in the world. We're number one!!

Ultra-high capacity SSD drives have made a device the size of the Snowmobile unnecessary today, what formerly needed a cargo container of spinning platters can now fit in a footlocker.

You'd be surprised how many organizations have the need to move petabytes of data, mostly archival data which is only marginally accessible on stored tapes or tape libraries that break down as they age. Moving it into the cloud can make it available for analysis or ML training, or other usages which were not practical in its previous storage configuration, and depending on the options chosen and the cost of the previous storage may not even cost noticeably more.

Full Disclosure: I worked on the physical security of the Snowmobile when it was originally introduced, it was a really fun project.

The idea of the Snowmobile was to enable gigantic transfers of data, in the case of the first customer it was a GIS company with a data lake of 20 years of archived data. They built a fence in the parking lot next to the loading bay, ran some serious fiber to it, put in a bunch of cameras, and Amazon brought a cargo container full of racks of drives and parked it there. They then spent the next six weeks transferring their data to the Snowmobile (breaking their backup tape library three times in the process) while the AWS SOC continuously monitored the security of the container and their onsite security monitored the data line. Then Amazon hooked up the tractor, drove it to Portland (again continuously monitored by the AWS SOC), plugged it into the PDX data center, and over the next couple of days moved it all into their racks. Within a week the customer was offering products that their former configuration hadn't allowed.

The customer had estimated that transferring that much data via the fastest available connection would have taken 3 1/2 years, assuming no issues (as if that has ever happened). My understanding is that the Snowmobile was originally envisioned with the Pentagon in mind, as they have entire data oceans of GIS data currently stored on systems so old that they're buying parts on (literally) eBay. Today the Snowmobile is outdated, as a petabyte of data can now fit in a carry on suitcase.

I think that humanoid robots are not yet worth the time, mostly for psychological reasons. People see something that looks kind of like a person, even something as bizarre as Handle, and they automatically assume human-like capabilities so of course they will be disappointed. No one expects much of a dog, which is why people are so impressed with Spot.

Oh, carp. Posting to undo erroneous mod.

Russia just had an election earlier this year. If that's the quality of your knowledge of the world there's no reason to pay attention to anything else you say.

Oh, you're an AC, of course there's no reason to pay attention to you.

but that won't work out

It generally works for centuries at a time, which is much longer than military occupations tend to last.

"belonged to Tibet" as much as any territory "belongs" to a satrapy which pays allegiance and tribute/taxes (depending on the time period) to a larger and more powerful empire.

Well, considering the number of posters here who aren't bright enough to figure out how to create a user account . . .

Look up 'Project Mockingbird'.

I think that would be covered by the 4th Amendment:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons . . . shall not be violated