A brain enema would be preferred.

... combined with a large dose of IT illiteracy.

Where do people think data pasted into a web page form goes? Never mind the AI part, being able to read simple queries will give outsiders some intelligence about the kinds of projects and technologies your organization is working with. A foreign intelligence organization posing as an on-line seller can buy the right set of ad words and really go fishing for some interesting information.

They don't like the competition.

I haven't been paying close attention, thus my first question: did they manage to factor an arbitrary number larger than 21?

... all those investments in data centers.

Probably not in California. Investor owned companies pay taxes into the system to help keep public utilities cheap. In return, they get favorable regulations to keep revenue up, competition out and taxes rolling in. As long as they don't squeal too much under the thumb.

It's really a merger of state and corporate power.
"All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing agaisnt the state."

Who?

If by next year EV sales in the US haven't tanked, I'll be somewhat surprised - since Trump and his puppet-masters are actively trying to kill EVs for some reason.

Regardless, as I've mentioned before - my next car will be an EV, likely a Hyundai Ioniq 5 or 6. It's just a question of when I make the purchase. It's possible I'll change my mind on the make, although I can say for sure it will not be a Tesla.

Isn't Reddit enough?

Yes. Welcome to public power. Move to an investor-owned service area and utilities political power is much less. Because capitalism and free markets. With publicly owned facilities, "We decided" to do X. So there's no backing out on an individual basis. Even if "We" is an elite group within the government.

People were not born voluntarily, once alive we mostly don't die voluntarily. We won't stop voluntarily because it would be akin to dying voluntarily. We have to accept the fact that we are not in fact the Borg, we don't have one hive mind.

... Sony's legal department.

This.

It works in Africa because there are no incumbent producers whose market is being threatened.

It could happen in the USA, but for the structure of the utilities' capital financing. You may _think_ you are paying so much for a kilowatt-hour. In reality, a good chunk of utilities costs are fixed. And the rate structures are designed to recapture those, concealed as energy rates. Now here come the micro solar and wind producers, expecting to use the grid as their marketplace. Buying and selling energy across it and hoping to break even or possibly squeeze out a profit. But that won't pay for the system, so the utilities will rewrite their rate schedules to get people to pay for the infrastructure they use. Which means that your solar buy/sell rates drop to near zero. And most of your bill becomes a fee to connect to the system, independent of which way the net power flows.

Now calculate your ROI on solar panels.

Yeah, it's not like adoption exists.

No. Economy is movement of value, not of money. That's just speculation.

As little kids in a socialist country, we got fed the following tale:
Heating fuel in a mining town was very expensive. So the protagonist took a cart and a friend, went to the other side of a forest to buy wood cheaply, and with much effort, hauled it home. When asked why he won't haul another load and sell it at home, the guy answered: "I'm a worker not a speculant".
Abstracting from the nonsense of the price difference of wood being so high on two sides of a forest, the commies who produced this piece of propaganda inadvertently produced a nice example why trade is good despite not producing something by itself: the value it creates comes from moving goods to where they're appreciated (ie, needed).

Thus: economy is the movement of value (goods, services) between different owners who value those goods and services differently.
On the other hand, movement of money or similar tokens (eg. a wash trade) isn't valuable by itself.