Having a large energy consumer that is willing to decrease consumption at short notice for a relatively small amount of money is a great option for managing a grid if it means you can avoid paying for a coal powerplant to be kept ready and staffed just to turn it on for 40 hours a year.

Yes, I agree that this looks good on paper. I'm not posting a comment to debate this premise. I'm simply advising that we include a projection of this arrangement into the future. Beyond the immediate term.

Crypto-asset mining emissions are contributing 140 million metric tons of CO2 to the atmosphere each year. Electricity usage surges due to increased temperatures due to global warming due to crypto-asset mining. Rinse and repeat.

I wouldn't mind this arrangement if the additional power usage brought by crypto mining sponsored carbon-free energy production like nuclear or renewables. But as you accurately describe, these contracts with ERCOT are supporting increased usage of fossil-fuel power plants.

Twitter seems to be doing fine after laying off much more of it's workforce.

If that really happened, Twitter laying off more than 50% of its staff, you'd think that would be newsworthy enough to generate a story on Slashdot. Yet, there has never been a story on Slashdot about Twitter laying people off after Musk took over. I'm thinking you read about that on a different news source.

I'm ready. Let's go. I've got an extra kidney and am eager to donate it to an injured Ukrainian soldier who has no kidneys. Where do I sign up?

Stepping back, there are some surprising dynamics involved in this incident.

The submarine was partially made of carbon fiber to reduce weight. Traditional deep-diving craft are made entirely of thick titanium. OceanGate was trying to innovate in weight reduction, not strength enhancement. Why? To bring the operating cost down. A lighter vessel requires less lift capacity to deploy, hence a smaller mothership. This reduces the cost-per-visitor and enabled them to charge just $250k for tickets to the Titanic.

In retrospect, which is much more reliable that futurespect, it should be surprising that an actual billionaire would be pursuing the cheap-ticket ride to the Titanic. I would think they would say, "Oh, just $250k?!? I'll pass. Waiting for the submarine made with 10' walls of titanium that costs $2 million to ride in."

a consumer grade wireless device instead of a wired one.

I'm thinking there isn't a wire conduit through the hull. The purpose of this wireless scheme might be to transmit signals through the carbon fiber hull to the propulsion system outside the cabin. I'm really questioning the use of carbon fiber for this submersible. Sure, it makes it much lighter to crane out of the water than titanium, but maybe that shouldn't be the feature driving hull material selection.

I had no idea tourists were visiting the Titanic gravesite. This group has unintentionally created an additional attraction for these wealthy ghouls.

Apple will subsidize thin margins on their advanced-tech Vision devices through content subscriptions. Apple TV+ 3D becomes the iTunes for Vision. They've got a whole post-sale revenue pipeline prepped while Zuckerberg is still trying to figure out a profit path on his metaverse gamble. Apple will establish 3D streaming formats and deploy content production toolsets within Final Cut Pro for studios. Future Ted Lasso & Silo episodes will be filmed in 2D & 3D simultaneously. MLS Season Pass 3D will revolutionize sports content consumption. Other streaming platforms (Paramount+, MAX, Disney+, F1TV) will also record their content in 2D and Vision-compatible 3D to add a premium subscription tier to their offerings.The $3500 Vision Pro is a misdirection tricking Zuckerberg into thinking Apple has yielded the low-res, low-price market to Meta. Year two, Apple will release the sub-$1k Vision SE with the same resolution as the Pro and content compatibility while deleting the front-facing screen and other unnecessary flourishes.

Hard to prove a negative or provide a link to the absence of an article.

Elon Musk follows Slashdot on twitter among just 68 other accounts.

Sometimes he retweets, likes, or replies to Slashdot tweets.

Slashdot avoids posting content that would displease the person who can drive significant traffic to Slashdot via the periodic retweet. Hence, not a single mention on Slashdot of layoffs at twitter after Elon Musk took over the company.

As soon as a vendor starts talking about shredding retired hard drives, I'd ask them if the earlier part of the contract promising "encrypted at rest" was not reliable.

So Reddit lays off 90 people and Slashdot posts this blurb. Twitter deletes thousands of employees at the direction of Elon Musk, yet no Slashdot reference.

Would love to see the M4-MURDERER announcement. Recalls that chestnut of an Onion article about the razor company skipping 4 blades and going straight to 5.

Firethorn-

Your response is very thoughtful and detailed with good numbers, etc. I do respect it and have considered it, so please don't interpret my next comment to be dismissive. I agree that the current shape of the market sways towards well over $30k for ICE and EVs.

My forecast here is for future disruption to come along that will smush Tesla like what happened to Windows Phone and Blackberry.

I vividly remember Blackberry leadership thinking these new smartphones would never catch on because they lacked a physical keyboard. That was their competitive advantage they staked everything on and failed to significantly innovate. Same with Microsoft sitting on Windows CE and Steve Ballmer laughing at Apple's overpriced iPhone. Apple ended up taking the high-end market and Android swept the legs at the low end, killing every company trying to make both a mobile OS and a low-priced phone (Palm, Windows, Nokia, Blackberry, etc.).

Tesla is in that same space as Blackberry with their gigafactories churning out lithium-based batteries for their vehicles and other applications. Their batteries are like the physical phone keyboard for Blackberry. The cars they run on those batteries are stagnating. It's the batteries that make EVs so expensive and also limits their lifespan. The industry is ripe for disruption. Perhaps a non-lithium based energy storage medium will be devised. In the meantime Tesla is doing well.

First mover advantage works for awhile. Then an innovator comes along and pushes them completely out of the market. Tesla seems dominant, but they're really the blackberry of EVs.

It doesn't even take an iPhone-equivalent to crush them. In many ways, it was the commoditization by Android that destroyed Blackberry. Tesla seems unable to crack the sub-$20k market. If market forces shift to enable other manufacturers to sweep that consumer strata into their coffers, that could be what wrecks Tesla. Just on possibility.

Machine learning has been applied to the sound of people's voices and correlated to all sorts of physical attributes. A small snippet of your voice can reveal:

• age
• ethnicity
• gender
• mental health issues
• smoker
• level of education
• weight
• victim of neurological degenerative diseases such as ALS and Parkinson's disease

This can be abused by insurance companies in obvious ways, and also in less obvious ways. Say for instance, premiums are reduced for an employer that records job interviews and submits those recordings to the insurance company. The insurance company then responds with a report of the findings by their ML algorithm. The person might have an undiagnosed disorder they are unaware of, the company becomes biased against that applicant, and the insurance company avoids adding a subscriber who is going to cost them a lot of payouts down the road.

As someone who saw probably $1000 worth of MoviePass screenings, I jumped through the hoops of the Telly registration process. No credit card required. I don't see how they have any recourse if I do whatever I want with this physical object. Sadly, I expect the doomed future of this company will contribute hundreds of tons of eWaste to landfills. So I am a bit torn at participating. I might just cancel before the device is shipped.