My local Sears (in the Capitola Mall) had all kinds of departments. They did tires and batteries, had sizable camping and exercise equipment sections, a fairly decent electronics section with I think three different computers, appliances, housewares, jewelry and watches, and probably some other things I'm forgetting besides clothing obviously. And they had a fairly active catalog and layaway department, as Sears still had a fairly large catalog at the time. They were fairly easy to deal with, their prices were decent, they had good sales. They also had parts departments and you could get replacement parts for most of their tools many years later, and of course the hand tools had lifetime warranties (except for torque wrenches, even if the failure is not related to the torque part... sigh.)

The one complaint I did have about vintage Sears is that those parts were usually stupidly expensive, like they'd sell you a $5 primer bulb for a string trimmer for $20 plus shipping.

The fact that Azure is popular isn't a coincidence. It's in part because it's the easiest thing to get to from Windows, and Windows is still dominant in business and government. As you say, integration.

So if you're using less Windows at home, Azure is less appealing. There's still a case for it, you might still choose to use it etc, it's just less likely. That's why whether the customers are running Windows or not matters. And Windows is becoming steadily more offensive — can you ever trust it with your data on any basis? And oh yeah, Microsoft has had several embarrassing failures of security in Azure-related services.

I don't agree. As long as they still had real estate and shipping, they were in a position to make a comeback if they only demonstrated some competence. But instead of that, the real estate was sold off and the web site was never made not trash. As I recall they mostly hung on to the shipping and did some deals there, and they also had a line of business doing largely incompetent repair work, but selling the property was a huge failure.

Yeah, I was only first slightly politically aware of Reagan, although I guess you could count Clinton as the post-post script of the Southern Strategy.

No. I only remember when R meant klansman capitalist and D meant not-klansman capitalist.

1) Prosperity theology is the dominant religious belief system in America. If you are successful, it's because God loves you!
2) Lots of people are stupid enough to think he had a lot of money before he got access to the presidency and therefore bribes from all sides, instead of a lot of property which was worth less than the amount of debt he had. Therefore they can believe that he was wealthy, which means God loves him. (See point 1.)
3) They love that he says the kinds of things they say and wants to hurt the people they want to hurt.

The heat pump's working fluid doesn't have to be water, it'd be whatever fluid can phase change at a "convenient pressure". The released heat on the high pressure side would be used to boil water into steam, which could then be moved to a turbine to generate power.

That "working fluid" woud be what is circulating on the low pressure side, through the cooling blocks.

Sears used to own a bunch of real estate and a trucking fleet. This let them ship things anywhere in the country in a reasonably timely fashion and keep costs low on both ends. They did absolutely, pathetically flub web sales, but it really wasn't too late to fix that. They at least had done the work of getting the product information digitized, even if the web site was otherwise a loss. (It really was terrible, and so were the prices, wtf.)

Compared to cryptocurrency, LLMs are dramatically useful. They don't do just of the things their proponents claim they do, and probably never will, but at least they do some things. Cryptocurrency is only a way for a different group of assholes to get rich enabling crime. It does nothing you couldn't do with just another normal fiat currency.

Even if it's all true, it's all irrelevant. Not only are these problems not those problems but we don't have decades. It's small comfort though that the ultra wealthy won't get what they want because even if they killed off literally all of the rest of us, AGW would not stop.

Sears did not "fail", they were willfully destroyed by a vulture capitalist.

Explain why relying on storage is a bad thing when renewables plus storage are cheaper than nuclear. Explain it like you're twelve, because mentally, you are - nuclear is shiny so you want it.

I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone trying to use the waste heat that all this computer power is generating? I realize that would impact cooling a little, but surely SOME of this can be recovered efficiently? Steam turbines are the usual way to turn heat into electrical power. Is there no way to do it for data centers?

For example, use a heat pump to concentrate the heat to above boiling temperature then use that to boil water to run a steam turbine. The heat pump would require some power to run, but I think you could run that at a net-positive for power?

that pardon cost? Trump doesn't strike me as the type to do anything like that for free.

Don't exist like a non-shit keyboard layout on iOS? They're not even smart enough at Apple to give you a layout where the number keys are across the top row when you're entering a password.