The amazing thing about Elon Musk is that when he was a student he actually lived on $1/day for a while. He said that knowing he could live on so little was quite freeing, enabling him to take more risks.

I really don't think of him as your typical billionaire.

Yeah, the only difference is that Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000, two years before Space X was founded, and only just now launched his first rocket. Bezos sounds like the Justin Hammer of the commercial space industry.

You purchase it so that you can store grid electrical energy while the rates are low overnight, and use it when rates are high during peak hours.

Yeah, it's called posting on an iPad :(

Then draw from the grid when you are cooking. Or buy two or three.

Uhhhhhh...gigafactory?

Yes, just like everybody could be great at higher mathematics if they just studied diligently, and win Olympic races if they would just train regularly.

Recognizing that you're incompetent is an important first step - but it does not directly imply that you can substantially correct the deficiency.

You are conflating currency supply with inflation/deflation, which muddies the waters. Inflation/deflation depends on both the amount of currency in circulation, AND the amount of economic activity represented by that currency. The only way Bitcoin inflates at 10% is if the amount of economic activity conducted in Bitcoin grows 10% slower than the currency supply.

Of course at present the value of BTC is dominated by currency speculators, which throws everything off, but the basic principle remains.

Not true, it simply raises the investment bar. Let's say that at present a currency is inflating at 5% per year - that means any investment where the expected (risk-weighted) return is better than -5% is worth considering. If instead the currency is deflating at 3%, then only those investments with an expected return of better than +3% are worth considering. That does mean that low yield investments will tend to stagnate, but the high yield ones will still do fine.

You're also conflating money supply with inflation/deflation: Let's take a hypothetical world in which there's a fixed amount of the One True Currency (OTC) which is the only medium of exchange. That does NOT mean that the value of the currency will increase, decrease, or stay the same - THAT will depend on the total value of the economic activity. Lets say that initially the economy is growing at 10% - the value of the OTC will likewise grow at 10%. And since it's hard to find investments with a 10% expected return, investment will begin to stagnate. For the sake of argument lets say that directly implies that the economy will stagnate as well (there's a huge debate to be had there, but let's ignore it for the sake of simplicity), so next year the economy grows at only 3%. So now the value of the OTC will likewise only grow at 3%, making far more investments become viable, and the economy stagnates less, but perhaps not enough to avoid sliding into decline. So the next year the economy shrinks 2%. Wham - now the value of the OTC is shrinking at a 2% rate, and even investments that are only expected to break even become more attractive than sitting on your money - we're back into the current inflationary currency situation. So investment picks up, the economy begins to grow, along with the value of the OTC, and we're back into a deflationary scenario. Basically the economy would tend towards the historical norm of equilibrium rather than the perpetual growth that has characterized the last few centuries.

But of course that scenario is based on there being only one currency to deal with - which is unlikely. Without oppressive regulation there's nothing stopping people from creating alternatives, and at least some of those alternatives will inevitably go on to capture a share of the total economic activity - thus reducing the percentage of activity conducted in OTC, and with it the value of the currency.

Honest question: Is the Argentinian currency actually tied to the economy? In other words, is the their economy shrinking at a comparable rate to the value of its currency, or is the government just playing the common trick of printing money rather than raising taxes/cutting spending?

I don't think that is necessarily true. One option is to build hybrid electrical airplanes. And if battery power density and durability continues to improve, I think you might be surprised what is possible if you fill the wings of an airplane with electrochemical cells. Elon Musk has speculated that electric airplanes might be possible if we go beyond the incremental improvements of the current players.

Sorry, that should be "if you answered no to both questions"

Perhaps Microsoft was counting on Moore's Law rendering the hardware unable to "get the job done" by now rather than performance improvements pretty much stalling out for the last decade, but that's their problem. If you want to bet on unstated "gotchas" crippling a contract in your favor, you've got to also be willing to have that bet turn sour.

Is the hardware dead/retired? Is the support still free? If you answered no to either question, then they *aren't* honoring the deal. Unless the contract specifically said "service life" AND gave a definite maximum duration for that term, then the life of the hardware is until its owners decide to retire it. Running 15 year old hardware that still gets the job done is hardly an unusual scenario.