Oh, it's a pittance, to be sure and it is a very limiting way to live

To clarify, do you mean sure it is possible to generate electricity yourself, or do you mean sure it is possible to live without electricity? Either way, while some city dwellers can, it is simply impractical to the point that we might as well call it impossible for many people currently living in cites to live in high rises and skyscrapers without electricity. It is also practically impossible for most of them to generate enough electricity with the tiny access that they have to the resources they would need. For example, many apartment dwellers have a couple of square meters of windows or less and most of them do not have exposure in the right direction and have significant obstruction. Even if it were not probably illegal and disallowed by their landlord to install solar panels on the outside of their apartments, the amount of solar power they would generate even by doing that would not meet their needs. Cities are heavily dependent on infrastructure to support human life and often have a population density far to high to support human life if not for infrastructure and resources that come from outside the city. It is a form of specialization and some of the required infrastructure required is the electrical grid.

And one of the ways that the majority of city dwellers would have to change their way of living would be to stop being city-dwellers. Which was really my point: that you should have included that as a condition in your original post. Quite frankly, I suspect that the level by which you expect people to drastically change might require the majority of people now living to change their status to not living, though it is hard to tell because you have avoided being specific.

This said, I personally am not a big fan of city dwelling and I do not live in a city and where I do live is still too built up for my tastes. However, I can appreciate that many people do prefer to live in cities and there are traditionally some good reasons for them to exist. The fact that they are inherently incapable of being self-supporting is not really a big deal. Not when you consider that the modern world and its currently available technology and legal/tax/zoning/etc. framework makes self-sufficiency problematic for the majority.

I am however, in favor of people achieving as much self-sufficiency as they possibly can in the environment they find themselves in. I think everyone that can should probably be getting home solar and batteries at this point. I do not find the power grid intrinsically bad, but I do think people should avoid dependence on it as much as they can. I also recognize that we live in reality though, and simply expecting people to just abandon all aspects of modern living is not realistic.

As RossCWilliams pointed out, this is obviously not an example of natural market forces since this is a public project. The argument about property values also seems a bit dubious and like it may be just your opinion. You might have to cite some evidence of that.

The biggest problem I have with your post though is that, yet again, it has nothing whatsoever to do with what I originally posted about. Mea culpa I guess for not doggedly re-iterating my previous point over and over again in every post and naively expecting you to be interested in anything other than just pushing the same point over and over oblivious to what the other person is saying.

To re-iterate, my actual post was about the fact that nuclear power plants (which you seem to be talking about, but avoiding explicitly saying) have a long lead in time, but the demand from TFA appeared rapidly and may disappear rapidly leading to a lot of financial doubt and uncertainty by investors. Then, there is the huge expense by itself, which is also a problem for investors.

A lot to unpack with your post as usual. I am just going to try to avoid the usual deep thread with novella length posts and just point that:

seems to be at odds with TFA. Part of the whole point is that five years ago, the additional power that these AI centers demand was not on the radar. We also do not know if that demand will still be there five years from now. The chips could double or triple in power efficiency. The algorithms? Those could become hundreds or thousands of times more efficient. The whole thing could turn out to just be the latest economic bubble (note, when I say "could", I mean that it will since we already know that with almost 100% certainty) which could collapse (of course, there are other uses for additional electric power if we electrify more things that traditionally burn things for power instead, the data centers could migrate away from where the power can practically be delivered, etc. So, generally, that statement by you does not fit in very well at all with TFA.

I have and, while we seem to agree that it is often a horrible, mangled mess, I am not sure we will see eye to eye on the causes. One of them certainly is from people who don't really understand the issues that the law deals with due to those people who think that language like "no bullshit hypotheticals" is clear and concise. What those people need to understand is whatever they may think a "bullshit hypothetical" is may very well be disagreed with, including by people who are experts in the field with a great track record of actually being right about their hypotheses.

I am pretty sure they neither negate, nor do they typically stack (you can put enhancers on sarcasm and, for example, be extremely sarcastic or scorchingly sarcastic, etc. but the way I read it, it doesn't multiply by itself to get anything other than itself, kind of like the number 1).

Vaguely worded legislation like, for example, "no bullshit hypotheticals"?

Look, I'm all for clearly worded legislation, but my point is that, if you actually want it to be clear, then you need to do a better job of being specific yourself. What specific things do you want people's standing to sue to be taken away for? As it stands, the courts seem to find way too often that people don't have standing to sue when, for example, one of their fundamental rights is being taken away, but the specific victim is not them. It is like the courts seem to completely forget most of the time that they work in a common law system where legal precedents become part of the law and affect everyone, even if those other people are not explicitly having that right violated right now.

So, yeah, if you want to take people's rights away, it really would be better if you would be explicit about the reasons. Just hand waving with a term that basically means "whatever my opinion on the matter happens to be" is not sufficient.

Bitcoin relies entirely on SHA256 ASIC's for hashing and they typically need replacing every year or two because more efficient models come out making the old ones unprofitable, especially at halvings. Due to the RoI and first-mover advantage the profitable ones are very expensive.

If you want to heat your home with proof-of-work, use a coin that uses RandomX or some other deliberately ASIC-resistant algorithm (usually CPU mining).

You can pool mine on an old CPU and still get a few pennies for your efforts, though if you want to invest in an EPYC and have other uses for it (maybe you have work jobs to run during the day and want more heat on cold nights) it could actually be profitable.

Resistive electric heating is still a very expensive way to heat, though some people don't have better options. There's a development near where I am that was built shortly after Nixon announced Project Independence and every house (cold climate) has wall-to-wall electric baseboard heating.

This has nothing to do with my post. The only risks or concerns I considered were the ones investors would have about whether they would get a return on their investment.

Ah yes. No "bullshit hypotheticals". Clear and concise legal language every legal scholar can get behind. (for those immune to irony, put a big mental sarcasm tag around that)

So, that would be 676 kilocalories (also known as a capital C Calorie, the kind that are confusingly used to measure energy in food). That is enough energy to heat a liter of water by 676 degrees Celsius. In other terms, it is enough energy to completely vaporize about 1.09 liters of water. Obviously you don't normally have to completely vaporize water to cook things (in most cases, anyway). So, this assumes high efficiency, which is another matter, but you could certainly heat an 800 ml family size can of condensed soup mixed with 800 ml of water for 1.6 liters to boiling point with that. None of this is a realistic model of course, including the idea that someone in that situation would be having a can of soup for their meal. It's just to point out that there actually is enough energy there.

I am not even going to go into your weird first-world centric questions from the second paragraph. Actually, they look very specifically UK-centric, but anyway.

Well, I think if you append "...to live a modern lifestyle" onto that first sentence, it becomes a pretty dubious proposition for some people. Not everyone. There are plenty of people who could generate their own electricity and be able to use modern electrical appliances without the grid, but there are also plenty who can not. Cities are a prime example of this. City dwellers in apartments, condos, rented houses, cramped ground footprint, etc. are often not able to live off grid due to practical limitations, and a lot of people may not live in cities. Now, you may simply argue that they should not live in cities. Without arguing that either way, I will just point out that you should have mentioned that in your comment.
Basically, while there might be many ways to live, many of those many ways to live are simply not practically available to vast sectors of the population for a variety of reasons. We might not need a grid (and indeed, there are many, many people who actually could live without it), but there would need to be drastic changes to do without it. This, btw, is coming from someone who strongly encourages everyone who can to get a solar power system and battery backup to be as grid-independent as possible.

First, I would like to say that you're both very pretty. I think this argument might be doomed to go around in circles thought because it does not look like either of you are characterizing the other's position quite right. It does not look like RossCWilliams is advocating for ditching the grid entirely, or even ditching grids at the local level. It seems more like the argument is that you can have a grid, but not everything needs to be connected to, or at least reliant on one central grid. If houses or entire communities can manage to operate entirely off grid, there should not be artificial barriers to that. More broadly, highly centralized power sources like one giant power plant might not always make sense.

Honestly, I think all you two are arguing over is the actual mix of off-grid to on-grid applications. The problem is that your arguments just keep getting seen by the other as an absolute. I would suggest that you each elaborate more of what kind of mix you envision. You may still not agree on the precise details, but then you will both be arguing over something that you actually truly disagree on.

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.

We have, but I should point out that if the great pyramid of Giza was broken down to its approximately 2.3 million blocks, 100 million people could relatively easily pick them up and carry them around. There are some logistical constraints with getting that many people working within such a small area, but if you ignore those and consider the construction of the great pyramid in terms of work units, moving and stacking blocks 100 million people could do all the actual physical labor in a day. So, the question becomes how many people are taking part in an endeavor and how much time is each person spending on it.

In this context, it seems pretty clear that "they" does not refer to the "cable guy", but to the cable company. "They" is the correct pronoun there because we are talking about a collection of people. Sure, there might have been one specific spokesperson who contacted you, but the language in question is just clearly treating the cable company as an entity. Now, maybe the cable guy did contact you directly, but that is pretty atypical. Even then though, this is a general scenario, not a specific scenario, so they would probably still be a "they" even if, for some reason, every single cable installer in existence were male, which is not the case.

Or, in other words. Try not to be a nutcase. Not every use of pronouns is an evil LGTBQ conspiracy against you.

Slight correction: "If revenue is rising ..." Even at the same price per KWh, utilities are better off if their systems are loaded right up to 100% capacity, 7x24. Residential and most business customers don't do this. Industrial customers and data centers come closer.

What _WILL_ cause our prices to go through the roof is when all these AI services fold and close up shop. Then, all the grid investments will have to be paid for by somebody. And that somebody will be the last person to unplug their toaster. See Whoops.

A metaphor is like a simile.