And you probably paid two million for a house because you lived in one of the big cities

LOL. When I did live in the big city, I lived in a house that I bought for about $54,000 in the early '80s (with a 12.125% interest rate) and went for about $175,000 when I moved out in 1999. I now live in an sort of mixed exburban / small town / farmland area about a 55 mile train ride to the big city downtown, in a house probably worth about $350,000 now.
And, yes, when I was a kid, back in the '60s, the big city air was pretty bad. But, thanks to the establishment of the EPA under Nixon, not so much now. Too bad the Republicans are currently trying to reverse a lot of the anti-pollution laws that Republicans had a big hand in creating

I can guarantee you that is not realistic to go to an office daily using anything other than a car in North America.

To the contrary, I had a 43 year career in North America making my daily commute by subway, elevated train, and commuter railroad. (though I did have to occasionally drive or fly to remote jobsites)

What state is that? I've brought cell phones into a couple of court buildings, even used them, no problem. I've brought cell phones in courtrooms, too, though there I had to make sure it was off, or in airplane mode at least.

That sort of wealth inequality is really required for this kind of pie-in-the-sky startup culture, though.

Bullshit.

If the company's costs are largely based on hours, whether estimated for a flat fee or actual for billing, it's going to track hours, salary or not. It's very common for certain salaried professionals to be paid for overtime. Sometimes that's straight-time pay, sometimes compensatory time off, sometimes something else.
(IANAL, YMMV, different states may have different laws.)

I'll try that again:

If you're paying salaried employees by the hour, they're not salaried employees./

Not strictly true. It's very common in my field (consulting engineering) to pay, as one of my employee handbooks put it, "1/80 of the bi-weekly salary for every hour over 80 worked in that two week pay period". As a professional, I was exempt from overtime rules, but employees would not be happy working overtime for free when fees collected by the company were generally based on hours worked (whether estimated for a flat fee or actual for hourly projects)

If you're paying salaried employees by the hour, they're not salaried employees./blockquot Not strictly true. It's very common in my field (consulting engineering) to pay, as one of my employee handbooks put it, "1/80 of the bi-weekly salary for every hour over 80 worked in that two week pay period". As a professional, I was exempt from overtime rules, but employees would not be happy working overtime for free when fees collected by the company were generally based on hours worked (whether estimated for a flat fee or actual for hourly projects)

Those who wanted to get an EV, have already got one.

I want one, and I haven't gotten one yet. (don't buy cars very often)

According to the NY Times, there was a meeting planned for 9 days later to figure out how to coordinate firing the laser with the FAA to prevent stupid accidents. So I'm thinking the FAA's 10 days was a WTF reaction to shooting the laser without any coordination.

I mean, if they are not firing the laser at Commercial or GA aircraft indiscriminately, why would the FAA need to close the airspace? And, right off the bat for 10 days?

10 days because there was a previously scheduled meeting 9 days in in the future to discuss protocols for using the laser in coordination with the FAA in order to prevent shooting things down that shouldn't be shot down. But the 12-year old boys in ICE/Border Control decided they couldn't wait to try out their new toy to shoot down a 'dangerous' balloon, showing that they really do need those discussions plus some actual training. Of course a 10 day shutdown wasn't sustainable, it seems to have been more of a shot across the bow.

My car insurance already uses AI chatbots. Couldn't get it to understand needing roadside assistance (part of our policy). Also couldn't handle that we were from out of state. And at one point got into their "press # if . . . " routine that didn't have an option for our non-crash-related situation. Ended up having to hang up and call our rep in our home state and have her handle it, which she had a hard time with also, but at least she could bypass the chatbot. In the end we got assistance from a friendly stranger, instead.

Did he still do his work?

Sort of. At that point he wasn't really trying too hard to do a good job.

Then whats the problem where he did it from?

Inevitably he was going to be asked to visit a job site, come into the office for some upgrade to his laptop, or any number of things that he couldn't do from overseas.

Sounds like you're jealous he got to do his work while sitting on a beach, while you had to waste hours of your time trekking into a miserable office every day.

LOL. I don't think he was sitting on a beach in March in Istanbul, and I was working from home during that time, not commuting (except for the occasional job site visit). Also, the office wasn't miserable, my commute was just long.
I wasn't jealous, I thought it was funny. The main problem I had with it was that he told me, so if my boss asked me about him it would put me in a difficult position. (Thankfully, that never happened, he was quietly fired after a couple of months, they never discussed it, never told anyone why he was let go.)

the only new thing mentioned is maybe using some snake faster compressors

Yeah, but the quoted 30,000 RPM is not that high of a speed for centrifugal compressors using standard refrigerants.
TFA doesn't really say much, but I'm guessing that it's some system that runs CO2 at high pressures and temperatures to cool the CPUs directly, and reject the heat to the outside air without a mechanical refrigeration cycle to raise the heat rejection temperature, since you're already running the CPUs at above-ambient temperatures.

TFA states 35,000 gallons a day is used for a medium sized data center, that's only 24 gallons per minute used. Assuming a 1.5% evaporation rate plus a 1.5% blowdown rate (to keep dissolved solids in check), that's 810 gallons per minute circulated. I think they are conflating water circulating and water used, but even with that they still seem to be off.

TFA doesn't explain anything about the system and seems to have a lot of misunderstanding. For example: 30,000 RPM is not unusual for centrifugal chillers. TFA includes a link to some Trane chiller system literature, but the only RPM references in that is to pumps for water circulation, which tend to be 1750 RPM, sometimes 3,500 RPM, with operating speeds usually controlled with variable speed drives.

You can do it either way, but spraying the condenser water directly into the air stream of a cooling tower is much more common.