So if someone hacks your bank account from overseas, not a crime unless it's a crime in that country?

If you look at economics that throws out the external costs of coal.

Globally fossil fuels recieve seven trillion dollars annually in public subsidies. But that's just a drop in the bucket compared to the costs it is allowed to pawn off on other parties. If fossil fuel users had to pay the externalized cost of pollution, then the world would be running on nuclear power right now.

I don't think Econ 101 price/quantity equilibrium is entirely what's going on here. Gigabit service *availability* is about the same in Spain and the US, despite America's per capita purchasing power adjusted GDP being about 60% higher than Spain's.

I think the relevant figure is this: Spain has roughly 2.8x the population density of the US. It's surely a lot more expensive to build the infrastructure to cover roughly the same percent of the population here.

What's your opinion of tariffs on imports eg 100% tariffs on EVs from China?

For one, Chinese is NOT a free market...

Although that's not *nothing*, the question is who exercises admnistrative control of that data. If the Chinese government demands data from ByteDance's management, and ByteDance's management complies, that data is not safe. Of course, even in the US a federal agency can obtain a secret warrant which enables them to help themselves to your private data held by a third party, and because it's *secret* you can't challenge the warrant's legality.

The smart thing is don't put anything sensitive onto any kind of social media. Now some metadata may itself by sensitive for certain persons, like your approximate location at various times. Such persons shouldn't use social media at all, even if the data is hosted in the EU, which generally has the best data privacy protections in the world, because there is *no* country in the world where a company can defy a lawful warrant, whatever "lawful" means in that country.

The new iPad pro has a "bendgate" problem - there's a huge weak point around the USB C connector.

You'd think Apple would learn, but... apparently not. All it needs is a bit more metal in an obvious place to test.

They could go into the laundry business. Make a fortune!

That'll knock a few IQ points off it...

Nothing involving marketing Call of Duty can be called "bold."

I think the incentives are fine on this one. They will not last forever, they reward early adoption for something very positive

Just what the electric cars once seemed to be to many people...

they reward early adoption for something very positive rather than the economically unsustainable electric car nonsense

Ah, but there are electric car subsidies too.

And, unfortunately, you cannot pick and choose — if you allow people without own "skin" in the game to pick winners and losers, you're bound to see lots of bad investments.

A private investor making a bad decision loses his own money and is thus automatically disempowered to make another bad decision. A government official has steady supply of the captive taxpayers' monies and remains on the job regardless of the quality of his decision-making...

California peaked out at ~71% solar powered mid-day today .. Texas hit 14.8% solar grid load

How much of that came from large utilities vs. residential roof-top installations?

Because the utilities aren't many — hardly a few scores nation-wide — yet, we're invited to celebrate "5 million installations"...

In 2022, the revenue of the electric utilities in the U.S. was $530 billion, so that comes to a hair under three percent

That's irrelevant, actually. The US Federal budget is even bigger, so what?

Seems a pretty small incentive.

It is multiple thousands of dollars per installation. Not small at all... And what did it get us?

And as the market grows, so does the incentive for innovation that will increase yields, efficiencies, and - hopefully - useful lifetimes.

I'd be perfectly fine with that, had the incentives were coming from the Free Market. But they aren't — it is government-sponsored. We, the taxpayers, are financing this — and it is the major part of a typical installers' pitch.

The billions of incentives — $15.6 billion in 2022 alone — would've bothered me, even if the results weren't as pitiful...

In Australia we have 1/10th the population but 3.5million solar installs

For one, over 70% of Americans live in "snowy regions, which receive more than five inches (or 13 cm) average snowfall annually". In Australia, I believe, only the Tasmanians live in similar conditions.

That explains a large part of the discrepancy. The rest may be explained by Americans' greater reluctance to accept, whatever the government is pushing — and, perhaps, greater concerns over dependence on China, .where much of the stuff necessary for solar electricity production is mined and made.

The marketing page linked to in the write-up talks a lot about the number of installations, while leaving their combined output away. One needs to consult government's (gasp!) web-site to find out, that the spectacular success we're celebrating is 3.9% of the total electricity consumption of the country...