There's not enough water between L.A. and Utah to support the people already living there.

Make that "... as solar panels got to 35c/watt,"

The only renewable electricity mix that does work is solar/wind and hydro. This is because with enough hydro, you can compensate for the intermittency of solar/wind. You can argue that you can do the same with batteries, but this is unrealistic at scale.

That last claim went obsolete as of at least two years ago, as solar panels got to 35/watt, LFP battery storage systems, and a burst of UL-listed all-in-one "hybrid" grid-interactive, grid-tied, and off-grid electronic systems became available, reliable, and had a series of price breaks that still continues.

As of a couple years back, a residential installation in a reasonably good solar location, sized to fully power a previously grid-powered home, could have a payback of two to four years (depending on electricity rates, i.e. about two for CA, more like four for more sanely priced locations). This for a system good for a couple decades before you need to think about rotating in new battery systems (15 yr) or adding a few more panels to supplement those that were getting below 95% of nameplate power (20 yr).

With about three days load as battery backup you can cover, not just time-shifting from day to night, but also a couple days of total grid outage combined with extended bad sun-power weather, before you need to turn on some backup generation to cover some rare bad hole. (With the batteries and inverter handling short heavy loads like motor starts, an emergency backup only needs to handle average power and can be sized MUCH smaller than a generator-only outage-backup system.)

Things have been getting much less expensive since then, and batteries, in particular, are expected to drop even farther and faster as more production and better chemistries come online, while the EV market begins to saturate. Panels in pallet loads (one pallet load being about right for one full-power house) were 25c/watt last week, self-heated 14.3 kWhr battery systems ("stackable": connect several for more capacity) for $3,300 indoor, $3,600 outdoor, $4,900 fir a grid-interactive hybrid all-in-one (12kW continuous, 16kW 5-min surge, merges w/line or backup gen when available for up to 250 amp @240V total output, 16 kW MPPT solar charge control, also stackable for increased inverter output and/or solar power input),

Grid-tied means you can pull power from the grid when it's available and you need more than your inverter and batteries+panels can provide. Grid-intractive means (if your power company has such service) you can push power back to the grid and, if not getting paid for it, get credit, using the grid for a month- or season-scale time-shifter rather than trying to buy enough batteries to store power over weeks or months.

This is retail for house-sized systems. Grid-sized systems have substantial economies of scale. They're deploying storage about as fast as it can be made, initially to shift several hours worth of grid power from gen-heavy to load-heavy or night times, probably working up to having enough storage to go all R.E.

The panels just get a little warmer (but never more than as warm as they'd get if they were just mounted in the sun but not yet wired up, which they can stand just fine)

Does being hotter make them less efficient when turned back on?

Yes, but not enough to matter.

And only while they rapidly cool toward a new thermal equilibrium over the next handful of minutes.

Why didn't you just buy Mexican fireworks like everyone else? It's not like they were hard to find.

Or visit a Chinatown in the lead-up to Chinese New Year?

I count six owners of the Atari brand

1972: Original Atari Inc.
1976: Bought by Warner Communications
1984: Warner sells home computer and console assets to Tramel Technology Ltd.
1996: Bought by JTS
1998: Division sold to Hasbro
2000: Hasbro sells Atari and Hasbro video game divisions to Infogrames

Post-1984 product identities under Atari Games, Tengen, and Midway brands, such as Paperboy and Mortal Kombat, remain with Warner Bros. Discovery, after ownership by WMS/Midway from 1996 to 2009. Hasbro bought back video game rights to Monopoly, Transformers, and other Hasbro product identities in 2005.

Solar farms and some domestic users are being charged during peak hours to take their electricity rather than being paid

Fortunately, photovoltaic solar can be throttled back or off at electronic speeds. The panels just get a little warmer (but never more than as warm as they'd get if they were just mounted in the sun but not yet wired up, which they can stand just fine). Let their control know when the power rates are getting near zero or switching over to negative and they'll just shut down. So it's just "heck, our investment isn't making money", not "fertilizer, we're paying the grid to take our power".

Wind turbines need a load to keep them from overspeeding and tearing themselves apart - at least until they can be "feathered" to something near full-stop, which takes a while (and which smaller house-sized windmills aren't necessarily of doing, or doing automatically).

Concentrating solar power (CSP) also takes a while to shut down. But phoey on them. They shouldn't exist, now that we know they spend their days turning birds that get near the focus into falling "smokers" when they try to land on the nice roost and their feathers, heads, and feet suddenly get hit with temperatures approaching half that of the solar photosphere.

The wreckage of the last 50 years of computing history demonstrates that assertion to be completely false for any realistic definition of "competent programmer".

In principle, any C program could be written without memory bugs, just like in principle all NP-complete problems have a solution. That doesn't mean that you could actually do either thing in the real world.

LOL. Dot com crash, here (look at my #)...

NYC is notorious for being in the hands of a certain ethnicity (that we can’t name and much less openly critic but has been universally hated throughout History) that is only attracted to money and thus cannot see beyond the next week and unable to look at long term trends

But they are! Middle manglement is too often people promoted beyond their competence

That’s because they did not have the free market mindset and were unable to change their minds, so they were put down by those who did and were thus more competitive.

Most honkies down there still have not moved past that mindset.

Also add the fact that the South has significantly less developed infrastructure and you have a perfect recipe for backwardness.

Found the little, petty middle-manager who’s too incompetent to measure work without having his cattle toiling in front of him, and who makes a power trip out of demanding petty, annoying stuff who wants to show he’s the boss!