I live in an all-electric house.

I bought heatpumps within the first 2 years of buying it. Heating with resistive electric is expensive and inefficient (technically it's about 100% efficient... which is awful compared to a heatpump which can be MORE efficient... because it uses the tiny amount o of heat already present in the air outside your house, even in sub-zero temperatures).

My electricity bill is one-third of what it was when I moved in, purely because of heatpumps. By comparison, I have also moved all my home IT to half a dozen individual Raspberry Pi's which, collectively, run at about ~100W... less than it costs to run my laptop, let alone a server.

Most people are trying to reduce their base load and reduce their heating costs, not increase them.

Can it put the fecking taskbar icons back where they were? And let me drag it around the screen? And bring back the start menu? And finally move everything into either control panel or Settings (but not both)? And actually let me choose to NOT update if I so wish? And making things an OFF BY DEFAULT OPTION first, and never removing an option, just switching it off for those who don't want it? And letting me theme Office again so I can make it look like Office 2000? And ....

Because I absolutely hate AI with every fibre of my being, but if lets me do those things, I might well consider supporting it.

It probably makes more sense given their scale for them to have their own power generation -- solar, wind, and battery storage, maybe gas turbines for extended periods of low renewable availability.

In fact, you could take it further. You could designate town-sized areas for multiple companies' data centers, served by an electricity source (possibly nuclear) and water reclamation and recycling centers providing zero carbon emissions and minimal environmental impact. It would be served by a compact, robust, and completely sepate electrical grid of its own, reducing costs for the data centers and isolating residential customers from the impact of their elecrical use. It would also economically concentrate data centers for businesses providing services they need,reducing costs and increasing profits all around.

Yep, any increase in demand is going to affect prices even if it's not in your location as costs for supply will increase. This increases for everyone not just the people next to datacentres.

Not that the OP didn't also have a valid point.

Would never work. No crawler runs in mindless, unrestricted fashion. They use a set of guardrails regarding what they will or will not follow. And even the simplest of crawlers are smart enough to not re-enter a destination more than once.

It's certainly possible that some people do, sincerely, 'fear' that the onrushing machine god will speak chinese and that it would be just the worst if all humans were rendered obsolete by the wrong side's robot when that's supposed to be our job; but, especially with how tepid the results are for the money poured in, it seems much more the case that we are seeing a lot of nakedly cynical playing of the 'give us what we want, lest the chinese win' by people who are otherwise on deeply shaky ground in terms of things like massive copyright infringement, voracious data mining, and an endless hunger for capital without any signs of returns.

It's like a vastly hypertrophied case of the 'race to 5G' stuff; where, if we didn't give Verizon whatever they asked for, China would have a faster rollout of 5G and we would lose the 4th industrial revolution or something? It was never entirely clearly what losing the race was going to involve.

The existential tone of the claims seem especially curious given how meagre the leads people are pouring billions into seem to be; and how readily 'AI' models can be poked at via distillation attacks or good, old-fashioned, electronic intrusion. If The Singularity kicks off that presumably changes everything beyond the powers of meaningful prediction(though that holds for whoever develops it as well as everyone else; given the odds that it will slip the leash); but as long as you are in the realm of incrementally more or less flakey chatbots it seems a bit weird to even talk like there is some sort of victory condition that will trigger and cause one side to lose.

At least the well off have something to give for xmas, or just to look cool in.

If nothing else they should not be allowed to call themselves a bank, including not a "trust" bank. Stick with crypto exchange or hascode pawnshop or whatever but not bank.

Pretty much this.

Banks and payment processors are making money for doing next to nothing every time someone uses a card... other organisations, especially merchants want in on this as they're the ones paying (directly, you're still paying indirectly)

Does anyone actually do this? Sounds like an urban myth to me.

The benefit of gift cards to shops is that they encourage people to spend more precisely because people donâ(TM)t want to lose that 44p. So if you've a gift card for £20, you spend £21 and pay the rest in cash/card.

That's insane! Sign me up and ship me out.

Good for you.

Now...

When can we fecking buy it?

So... complicate the whole scheme by adding graduated licensing by vehicle classification? Yeah... that'll fly. Imagine the bureaucratic nightmare if every time somebody wanted to move to a more capable car they had to certify on it.

Your SCCA license doesn't mean your solution is better than anybody else's.In fact, it might be working against you.

Really? You think at this point SpaceX is just going to throw up its hands and say "never mind" on Starship? I'm trying to imagine why they would do that.

Lol. What a piece of garbage at that price.
For some yarn.