I think you got the nail on the head.

specialized equipment is always better at sufficient volume. But it's also usually wildly expensive. Either Becuase its produced by a low volume specialist company or because you built it in house - either way you typically have massive embedded engineering costs and, to prevent those costs being even higher, you significant over specified all the individual components.

Programming a generic robot to do the same thing could be easier. Superficially it seems like the programming itself would be more work, and it might be, but on the other hand if you have a huge volume of a specific robot you can build an excellent programming Library to simplify the programming.

As an example consider that programming a four degree of freedom actuator to pick up something based on a barcode is probably more difficult than using a three degree of freedom actuator. That completely changes if you've got a library that already has integrated Machine Vision for the 4dof system but for the 3dof you are piecing it together yourself .

You do realize that tornadoes aren't showing to scale on the weather map right?

The year with the most tornadoes recorded in the U.S. was 2004, with 1,817 tornadoes.
A typical tornado path is about a quarter mile wide and 4 miles long for a area of effect of about one square mile.
Depending on your definition Tornado Alley is about 500,000 square miles .
Took all of the tornadoes happened there in a really bad year we'd be looking at about 2,000 square miles affected out of 500,000 total, or 1% .
That's not insignificant but it's not nearly the disaster you suggest, and anybody building these systems is using a better estimate than that when they pick specific sites.

Practically speaking making companies pay for the commute is just going to limit their hiring to bus radius. Maybe you'll get a free bus pass.

Paid travel time? The hiring radius just got smaller.

Your value to the company doesn't increase as you move further away so increasing a company's costs to hire you as you get further away doesn't make a lot of sense in the transaction.

Simple: fast charging is cheaper and easier.

I'm no train expert but I've taken them in the UK. Think about the space and logistics to move a rail car 'out of the way'. If the battery packs are similar size, you need multiple of those for a single train. You're also buying at least twice as many batteries to have two packs, possibly more if you want to swap batteries less often than you would have charged. And for what benefit? Perhaps you now have battery packs that last 2-4x longer but much higher upfront costs and likely higher operating costs (someone has to oversee that detached caboose).

Ultimately it's the same reason phones don't come with swappable batteries anymore. Yes it annoyed me when they first changed, but in reality my last two phones were replaced while the battery was still in acceptable condition (4 years).

You're worried about 300 gallons of oil? In a massive wind turbine?

Get a little perspective. If that was diesel run through a generator it would generate just over 4MWh of power (about 14kWh/gallon). Pay back on that oil is literally 30-120 minutes at nameplate capacity for modern turbine. Even on a relatively bad day you've recovered it in less than a day.

Even small farms likely have a tank of fuel larger than that for topping off the tractor and other equipment.

Lose the rejection of science and biology.

I think you mean "stop discussing science and biology above a grade 10 level."

Taking my MBA.

A key component of our strategy course is something called Market shaping. That's basically how to collude without technically colluding. The way they phrase it is that you don't want to compete on price because that erodes profits for everybody. Although naive economics would suggest that if there's a market for buying versus renting that market would be fulfilled it's not quite that simple. If renting is more profitable then, as other posters alluded, the people who are renting will have more money. They can use that money to help put the people doing the direct sales out of business or otherwise obstruct their market. The easiest thing of course is just to buy them up and change their model to match yours. You can also use your profits from one market to temporarily subsidize another Market. The latter strategy works in many cases even without driving the competition out of business - they get the message and play ball rather than engaging in a price war.

Very Brave New World. You may be correct, but I hope that people with UBI would find better things to do than make-work.

That said I would differentiate near-zero value make work from subsidized work where there is a significant benefit of having it done but perhaps we pay more than it's worth. Subsidized work is arguably a win-win to a point. When the work is near zero value you're just destroying that person's time which I would argue is a negative sum game. Personally I think a bare-subsistence UBI Plus the opportunity to work for a top up will give people a good safety net and a ramp towards a higher standard of living. Maybe in the long run this results in most people working 40 hours a month instead of 40 hours a week , that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Watermarks will always be relatively easy to remove unless they're highly intrusive. I think we need to go the other way and start signing Real content.

Imagine certificate Authority similar to what we use for SSL that assigned to the camera vendors. So your smartphone has a cert verified by Samsung Etc that confirms images really came from that camera sensor. There are definitely some limitations but it should be possible to at least have the originals and a lower resolution version signed.
Throw in better legal protections for digital certifications and you haven't eliminated fakes but you make them much more difficult to produce and riskier to distribute.

You realize that link is basically an ad for consumer toys?

Of course the capital cost for a tiny turbine is lower but the cost per kilowatt hour generated is much higher. Remember that doubling the length of those blades roughly quadruples the power output. A single turbine with 100m blades produces about 10,000 times the energy of a 1m blade turbine.

Exactly. They did this for some of the Lord of the Rings movies and it didn't look great at either frame rate. Too much motion blur at 48 fps and not enough at 24. Only noticeable in a few scenes at least to me.

You seem to be cherry picking the narrative promoted by a handful of anti-vaxxers, which does include a handful of published studies, rather than the overwhelming body of contrary evidence.

https://www.factcheck.org/2024...

Rooftop Solar without some kind of buffer (eg battery) would be unlikely to provide power with suitable stability. You don't want to brown out every time a cloud passes over, so there are probably some minimum requirements on the power quality you can feed into your household wiring.

I know there's an argument for it's my right to feed s***** power into my own house if I want to. However a lot of people with that mentality are then going to blame others when various appliances in their home fail prematurely.

Articles like this that deal only in absolute numbers tend to be meaningless at a large scale like a national grid. They've told us how much The Operators are paid to curb production but not how much the overall costs are or how much they would have been paid had the production been used.

Are the operators paid at the full rate they're capable of producing, or are they simply receiving a small stipend when the grid operator is bottlenecked?

Those analogies miss a few key points. In the case of both the RV Park and the hotel rental, electricity is being bundled with a much more expensive service and that service is typically provided over a relatively short time horizon. The bundling reduces the relevance and the short time horizon increases the effective cost of metering it. You have both the cost to meter/invoice and the friction of customers not knowing how much they're going to pay.
The effective cost of metering has also gone down as urban and Suburban settings as traditional meters start to be replaced by Smart Meters that can be read from the curb, the road, or entirely remotely.
That's said, I can imagine a future where people will rely more heavily on home solar and smaller batteries and the cost of your hookup is a significant fraction of your bill since you may not draw a lot of net power from the grid. If most people had batteries those grid connections could even be downsized since they would only need to support the peak draw over some average period not the instantaneous peak.