Bitcoin relies entirely on SHA256 ASIC's for hashing and they typically need replacing every year or two because more efficient models come out making the old ones unprofitable, especially at halvings. Due to the RoI and first-mover advantage the profitable ones are very expensive.

If you want to heat your home with proof-of-work, use a coin that uses RandomX or some other deliberately ASIC-resistant algorithm (usually CPU mining).

You can pool mine on an old CPU and still get a few pennies for your efforts, though if you want to invest in an EPYC and have other uses for it (maybe you have work jobs to run during the day and want more heat on cold nights) it could actually be profitable.

Resistive electric heating is still a very expensive way to heat, though some people don't have better options. There's a development near where I am that was built shortly after Nixon announced Project Independence and every house (cold climate) has wall-to-wall electric baseboard heating.

Epstein seemed to have a penchant for putting commas in random places. He used double commas too, for some reason. Epstein seems to have really liked commas and just sprinkled them liberally through his e-mails like glitter.

An anecdote is not correlation. It's not even weak evidence of a correlation.

Skinner, 1948, "'Superstition' in the Pigeon."

https://psycnet.apa.org/fullte...

I'm not sure why the Internet thinks Bubba is Bill Clinton.

https://hero.fandom.com/wiki/B...

Actually, the Epstein comma seems to be the worst.

It'll be at least half of that in ten years.

The Zoomers have no interest in cable TV.

> Why not just build the proper infrastructure with what we know works?

I tried to do this locally. The government allows the pole owner (electric or telephone usually) to charge $50/mo/pole to the startup that wishes to hang wires.

The owner pays $5/mo in property taxes to the town.

There are exceptions for large corporations that are in the state's good graces.

It's just to keep competition limited to the cartel.

Short answer: corrupt government.

This was my first thought as well.

Such marketplace confusion!

McDonnel Douglas landed a rocket more than 20 years before SpaceX did. ATK, Pratt and Whitney, Boeing and Lockheed have all been involved in recovering boosters using parachutes.

The point of booster recovery is to make them cheaper. SpaceX and Blue Origin are the second wave of manufacturers, focused on cost.

You haven't watched any of the Apollo landings? They're on YouTube.

Those geniuses think that by turning a landlocked province into a landlocked country they will suddenly gain access to the ocean.

New Glenn is about the same capacity as Falcon Heavy, maybe a touch less, both with full reuse. But SpaceX has also demonstrated recovering Super Heavy, which is a LOT bigger. You could pretty easily slap an expendable second stage on Super Heavy and the highest launch capacity ever.

If my conversions of crazy American units are correct you could stick an entire fueled New Glenn on top of Super Heavy and launch it.

Right. NASA, coordinating Boeing, Lockheed, North American, Rockwell, etc. were the first movers. SpaceX is the "copy cat" that takes the basic idea and mass produces it for a buck each.

It doesn't seem likely. The AI companies would have you believe that more compute equals smarter but they're already hitting dimishing returns pretty hard.

That's almost beside the point though. Railway and fiber companies built out more infrastructure than was immediately useful but then a bunch went broke and the survivors concentrated on making a profit. The big AI companies are in that first phase where they're trying to build stuff faster than everyone else. Next inevitably comes the part where they try and actually make a profit. If that involves ever more intensive investment then great, we've got a new industrial revolution, just like your semiconductor example.