Those 25 years to my 17th birthday took forever!

If there's ultra high vacuum required, it could very easily take many hours to pump down the pressure to the required level.

Very dystopian, but with some very off-the-wall characters and disturbing villains. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Hinz

Dune _is_ amazing, but please, for the love of Shai- Hulud, do not read the prequels or post-quels from his son. They are so far from canon as to poison the well of the actual Herbert novels.

"If prices had been higher in the US, perhaps..."

-Mad Maxx style Thunderdome fights would have arisen
-People would have moved back to riding horses
-We'd have all developed psychic abilities to communicate over large distances w/o needing to travel there

This type of speculation adds NOTHING to the discussion.

I think, next, we go straight to plaid.

most journalists only write up a summary of blogs.

Umm...yay!? Didn't we used to have to use some brilliant/analytical/scientific minds to create rulers and paper and textbooks and all the other necessities of research several centuries ago? Once discovered, didn't those tools free up more people to do more, and more difficult, research?

If we automate scientific research in some areas, those bright humans who would have otherwise been working on those problems are free to pursue some other, equally interesting areas. Have no fear, the Universe will constantly have more secrets for us to understand.

The trick, of course, is that many those that use stock ownership to "actually live on" are no longer gambling. There's no 100% sure money, but you can reduce the risks to such a level that they're not important to worry about any more.

Maybe they can sell your capacity to someone else at a more profitable price?

Electric Co: "I'm sorry mister aluminum smelting plant, I simply don't have any more electricity to sell you. Even on your 3rd shift, pesky consumers are heating their homes and charging their electric cars, and there's just no more capacity in our system, no matter how many buckets of cash you throw at us."

...1 year later after 25% of consumers have smart meters...

Electric Co: "Still have those buckets of cash lying around mister aluminum smelting plant? We've found some extra capacity and are happy to accept 3 times more money than what the consumers were paying for it."

You'll find, in fact, that many electrical utilities WILL NOT LET YOU SHARE FOR MONEY because they don't want competition. If any Joe Schmoe can put PV cells on his roof and actually do for himself what the utilities charge a premium for, that might mean a few less pennies on the quarterly revenue statements and the utilities lobby hard to stop it before it starts. They'll claim it's because of safety for "their" grid (built on public land, financed with public money, I'll note) and not wanting homespun systems connected to their systems and threatening everybody's electricity. However, that argument holds no water because it's the same grid in the next city, next county, or next state, and yet they have no problems with certified and tested inverters operating in a net metering way.

So what, their solution is a control loop arms race between smart meter designers and freezer designers? Freezing is a fight against thermodynamics, and if the freezer is not maintaining it's own, optimized control over temperature, any delays are like borrowing from the Bank of Carnot. You can always "pay back" the delta T debt, but you'll owe inefficiency compound interest on top of it.

The damned freezer knows 2 things: 1) cold enough? and 2) compressor on?. I completely understand that there are additional factors for the larger picture, but, to co-opt a meme, "freezers gonna freeze" and it's not sane to have them bargain with the smart meter to do their sole function. This will add complexity, cost, and pollution (adding wireless, ARM controller, memory, etc to a freezer introduces many new parts requiring...you guessed it...MORE ELECTRICITY to design, build, ship, and support) to the freezer for a negligible benefit.

Yes, two types in fact, depending on whether the government supports them (i.e. "patriot", "freedom fighter", "revolutionary") or the government does not support them (i.e. "terrorist", "enemy combatant", "extremist").