Microsoft is about Azure and Office365 now. Everything else is 'yes we also do that status'

If we are being honest, Azure ain't half bad either, its good for all reasons the past greatest hits were. It does everything it needs to do while being easier to get your head around than AWS, or GCP.

If Microsoft has a problem its that Azure and o365 were huge build outs but now are more or less feature complete. There isnt a growth story, for any company not already on them what can they offer as a compelling reason to move there?

This why you see 'copilot' being shoved into all the things. Microsoft does not have a vision right now, or to the extent they do it is - 'let's market AI stuff, and build out Azure capacity to sell AI model compute, so other people can market AI stuff.'

Long story short the next 10 years of the NASDAQ performance is either going to look like the last ten because AI powers big tech to new heights or its going to get real ugly when the irrational exuberance for all things AI runs out of stream

Yeah I did not have any stats on how far the typical school bus travels in a day. If anything it just makes the argument that fleet vehicle charging is some kind of problem even less compelling.

Reality is unless you are operating a very very large bus depot, you would not need to add any wild electrical infrastructure, certainly nothing beyond what a typical small office building would require and that should not be an issue for the electric utility to deliver or a cost problem for a school district.

When it comes to charging EVs, time is a huge resource. Everything is simpler, cheaper, safer, lower wear, etc when you don't have to do it fast. Fleet vehicles are really a perfect fit for that because you typically do have 11-12 hours to 'trickle-charge' them at 14 amps.

I live in a deep red county and I can tell you this is not the case. I won't say there are not some guys that just want to 'roll coal' because they think it looks cools, there are, but that is true of every strange hobby out there, in terms of numbers they don't matter.

The rest of the people not buying EVs are doing it because they

1) Don't have the have the capital or credit required to purchase a 'new' anything, they are in the used market and the used EV market does not have the products they want.

2) They are actually hauling pigs, cattle, hay, etc around at frequency and the only EV that really is a good fit for that is the Silverado and it aint affordable

3) They live in really old housing stock, they have things like 60AMP and 100AMP electrical service and even they can shoe-horn in a L2 charger, the performance would cramp their life style at least a couple times a week. Normally yeah mom and dad can use the cars during the day and charge them over night but on Friday night John Jr borrows the car and is out to 2am with his buddies, so yeah its actually not ready to take Susan to her tap lessons 30miles away Saturday AM.

4) They don't really see much advantage, the TCO isn't that different. They are still at the filling station often enough anyway, they still got lawn equipment, tractors, backup generators etc, and so they are are carting 30gal diesel tanks and 5 gal gas cans around in the pickup bed anyway. The folks in passenger cars gotta get groceries and house hold items, there are gas stations near the Food Lion, Dollar General, and Walmart anyway so it really takes no additional time. Even if over 10 years they might save a few $100 with a base model EV over an economy ICE vehicle the familiarity of ICE is more appealing.

BEVs are getting better, Hybrids are getting much smarter and better and importantly simpler, Honda's inline stuff in really does not add that much complexity. I see people getting either BEVs are Hybrids as a 'second' car all the time around here. Decisions are being made very rationally and at the margin. The media and BEV enthusiasts keep wanting to insist we are at parity, but really we are not. 10 years ago the suggestion BEVs were 'just as good' was laughably stupid, now its is very nearly true and even is true for many people/use cases. Its getting there and people will switch 'better'/cheaper is achieved. They are already switching. It just needs a little more time.

I don't think fleet vehicles should be much of an issue. Look at this way you have probably a full 12 hour window 6pm - 6am where those things can be parked.

School buses, mail trucks, plumbing vans, and the like don't actually need all that much range, maybe 200 miles. EVs don't pay the penalty for idling the ICE vehicles do.

Stuff like A/C and things would use power but these are public school children we are talking about, we'll make them open the windows, and when they do get to school we'll serve them some ketchup on toast with a side green beans canned in the Regan administration for lunch.

Even a basic 400 amp service, at 80% load gives us the ability to feed 13amps into 24 school bushes continuously. That will charge them enough in 11 - 12 hours. 24 buses is a lot of buses. I'd guess school districts that have more than 24 buses also have multiple bus depots already.

I think the latter. Peter seems to have gone all Artsy'fartsy

Which is fine if you are into that sort of thing. From what I can tell of his rather limited public persona now though he seems to take no interest at all in the Software or tech industry.

Globalists - who are of course out of their GDed minds.

That is who let this happen. It all stems from the same anti-nationalist mentality that emerged after the second world war and was allowed to take over western academia.

The thinking goes if everyone depends on everyone else nobody will fight any more. Of course reality is not all dependence is created equal. Leaders like Xi understand depending on a consumer market is different then depending on supplier. Sure if they decided to start WWIII we'd quit buying, all those factors can focus on making weapons until the smoke clears, on the other hand no matter how much you want to use the defense production act, you are not getting any shells or aircraft produced in those Glodman Sachs office, McDonalds restaurants, or CVS pharmacies.

National security is a game to these people. Oh the US governemnt contract says everyone has to be a citizen with a clearance or directly supervised by one. Never mind why the rule exists or what it was supposed to accomplish, Microsoft upper management knows perfectly well in this case the latter practice can't be very effective, they just don't give a F*** they can win the bid, that is all they care about.

Congress made the internet commercial in 1992.

Well what should he do?

Sure you'd love it if Mark could have some great flash of insight and invent something or significantly enhance a concept like taking MySpace to early facebook, but playing catch up and 'us too' is surely better than sitting around doing nothing right?

Microsoft more or less ignored the Internet from 1992-1994 and that was an expensive lesson. The were comparatively quick to replicate what Amazon was doing with AWS and while only someone who has made a career of papering the cube walls with MCSE certificates would say its been especially innovative, Azure has been a success for them.

They tried to get into the smartphone game, that did not work but if they'd they just deiced well trying new markets did not work let's go back to selling Windows CALS, and Exchange/Office volume license agreements, along with some mixture of SQL and Business Analytical tools would that have been a wise course?

Reality of tech is the market does change (or at least cycle) and if you don't diversify or at least seugway your product into buzzy space du jour, you can get left behind and your business can vanish astonishingly quickly. Meta can't afford to do nothing, but being number two, especially if primarily by virtue of being second to the party when you have a first rate offering can still be fantastically profitable. The investors know that, and they rather Meta gable their money trying to catch the next wave the stand around hoping people never get tired of facebook-insta.

People forget but there was a time around 2003 or so when the investor class was seriously pushing for Microsoft to became and investment bank because they did not know where else the growth could come from now that the world ran Windows and Office.

Obviously giving away that kind of service to some 'deserving' clients is a pure marketing move. Its not like they are keeping it a secret they did that. In fact it would not surprise me if some agent of theirs put the idea for the article in the reporters ear and said and you know such and such would have good anecdote to fit into it. That is how the sausage is made in the hospitality industry.

You might get away with scamming them but, it would also be nice click bait story for some dining rag to bust you for it. Is your personal reputation so little you'd trade it for $500 plate?

Exactly America has no problem electing women. There are plenty of Federal legislators, and plenty of State Governors that prove it isn't a sex thing. Its a Hillary is insufferable and Kamala is a vapid whore thing.

It is not the same at all. There are no practical reasons to cut up the Mona Lisa and it is obviously best enjoyed as single piece.

The Shuttle is entirely different. First transporting as smaller components solves a lot practical problems, so there is justification.

Second it isn't one monolith to start with like a single sheet of canvas, its thing already made up of thousands, maybe 100s of thousands of components. So you're integrity argument is nonsense. I am not about breaking it up selling it off bolt by bolt or something at the souvenir stand, I am talking about a cohesive presentation of the whole thing.

Third it would be better enjoyed if you could see more of it. Ever been to railway museum, when we are talking about an old steam engine or something that can't run anyway what is more interesting to look at, what can learn more from? A long steel tube, or one where a section has been taken out so you can actually see inner plumbing of the boiler etc? We do this with other stuff like ships and aircraft as well. The Shuttle isn't "art work", it is a product of science and industry and it should be presented as such.

Well because it is actually hard.

Case in point. I arrive at our county transfer station.
There are two bins, one labeled cardboard and on labeled paper board. What is paper board? I did not know, honestly still don't looking on line lots of different products ranging from corrugated materials to construction paper. Also a sign that says no glossy print.

So I asked the attendant. Where should this serial box go is it cardboard or paperboard, is just trash because it has glossy coating? They could not tell me.

Ultimately I tossed it into the cardboard recycle. Figuring certainly if common grocery store cereal boxes (with the inner plastic bag removed) can't be recycled someone would have asked "why are we bothering with any of this" by now.

But honestly I am not 100% sure county waste can recycle anything but bog standard cardboard shipping carton with minimal printing and plain copy paper. In the way of paper products. Based on looking at what others throw into the bins this isn't the case but even if you go on the county waste site and read thru all the rules seemingly everything else is excluded in one way or another.

Plastic is even more complicated. You have the soda companies attaching the caps to bottles now so they don't get separated but I am not sure they are even the same type of plastic and don't need to be binned separately...

The whole system is really unusable

It is not like these things ever need to fly again. There really isn't a reason why it can't be cut apart and crudely welded back together at the destination site.

Can you do it for 2 million, hell no. Can you get it done for the 83 million in the bill, yes I think damn well can if you take a rational approach.

Heck you maybe don't even need to put it back together. mount the parts on polls arranged like they'd go back together but with space between them, slap some clear acrylic sheets on the sides to keep the weather out and build some stairs and platforms so people can walk between them and look in. Probably make a lot better exhibit anyway.

No Washington is mostly an ugly shit hole on swamp land. The National Mall is beautiful out side of that it really is just barely navigable often decaying urban landscape.

Now there are lots place in Northern Virginia and Maryland that are also beautiful and nearby but they are also not Washington.

So wait which is it?

Do we have the "capital, brain power and legislative frameworks to solve" this problem, or do we have "incapacity to deal with it at scale"?

I am going to go with the latter. We absolutely can't solve the micro-plastics problem. At least now without plunging a billion people back into the grips poverty, disease and death. There simply are not chemical and materiel analogs known that can replace plastics. Not without blowing a hole thru every other environmental remediation objective we have.