WHY?
Because "AI"!
That's all the justification needed until the possible AI implosion.
And no, I don't require every city to plaster its roofs with Solar. I just want to point out how much people underestimate the potential of Solar, because they totally underestimate the amount of energy the Sun actually provides.
Lets say, we are able to capture 20% of the Sunlight reaching the ground (actual numbers are more closely to 25%, and research solar cells reach 45%). About 70% of the Sun light is reflected by the Sun's atmosphere. In the temperate climate zone, Sun light hits the ground on average at an angle of about 45. Lets consider rainy days, and about 10% of the Sunlight will be ready for capture, of which we then capture 10%. With the Solar constant being about 1.4 kW, that means that each square meter Solar can capture 14 Watts. A person living in a city needs about 2000 kWh per year (which not only covers domestic use, but also powering the infrastructure), and with a square meter able to catch about 140 Wh per day, each person needs about 20 square meters of Solar to fully cover their energy needs. A city like Houston has a population density of 1600 inhabitants per square kilometer, which means that for each person, there are about 600 square meters of land area in Houston. Only 20 of them are needed to power the city.
And then, you are projecting linear growth for Solar and Wind, but the actual growth rates are exponential. Roughly every three years, the amount of Solar and Wind installed is doubling - doing so for the last 15 years. In 2027, the World will install 1400 GWp, in 2030, it will be 2800 GWp. Taking your 25% estimate (it's actually more like 17%, but that moves it just into the next year), we will install as much Solar in 2045 year as the total fossil energy output today.
Hasn't the UK been doing this for years? Levying a fee based on total distance of your journey?
Given that Microsoft isn't cool at all, and has no clue what 'cool' even is, I think it's gonna be a long uphill slog to failure.
This, exactly.
The most immediate thing about being cool is that nothing that is forced, is cool. Copilot existing, with some cool demos and higher thresholds on the free version, could possibly gain some opt-in usage. Copilot being forced everywhere means that people are going to associate it with something intrusive, and no amount of marketing is going to undo that.
ChatGPT didn't force anything onto people's desktops or into their spreadsheets, they didn't run TV commercials and they didn't give sponsorships to 101 Youtube personalities...they existed, and they improved the service, and word-of-mouth was all they needed.
If Microsoft wants their level of adoption, they need to stop pushing...but the problem is that nobody will accept a slow ascent, so they need the accidental, unwanted usage to show the 'growth' being demanded by the MBAs.
One day they'll figure it out...probably the day after they have a fire sale on nVidia GPUs that have sat dormant for months.
The only reason that this is possible is because there is very little choice. As a merchant, you either don't accept any cards or you apply the fees on all sales.
Point of pedantry: some merchants offer a "cash discount", i.e. they forward the cost of processing only to those with credit cards.
Some here will say that this is not a monopoly but the industry acts as one.
In order to accept Visa and Mastercard you only deal with one representative which offers almost identical contracts with most cases the only difference is the name of the credit card. They even dictate the terms of every payment method that you may accept. The only reason they can do this is because there are no other options. In effect a monopoly.
This is partially true, granted...but not entirely. Target may be big enough to interact with Visa directly, but most vendors instead work through payment processors like FirstData or Clover, who work as a middleman to ensure that businesses who *want* to be able to accept Visa/Mastercard/Discover/AmEx can do so seamlessly. There may be rules, but the outcome is that the business doesn't have to negotiate contracts with every card company.
With that said this will do little to change the situation since it puts the merchant in conflict with the client where the cause of the problem is the impositions of an oligopoly's terms on all payment methods.
The sad part is that people believe that they are not paying a 5% premium for that 3% reward.
If the merchants aren't giving cash discounts, and a $10 item is $10 in cash or $10 on the AmEx...then they're right, they *aren't* paying a 5% premium by using their AmEx - they're paying a 5% premium when they use cash.
imagine how many more thousands they could save by replacing 200k in toy computers with a real datacenter platform.
How many hardware guys does it take to change a light bulb? "Well the diagnostics say it's fine buddy, so it's a software problem."
