Anyone with a good lawyer and lots of money can get out of a conviction now if they show any of their location data was harvested illegally by a third party and the US government bought that data and might have used that data to gather further evidence. As if the US justice system wasn't already a two tier system...

In this case OG&E and their investors wanted the new solution. They had already invested money, taken the risk and seen a return far beyond what they expected using the new pricing model. Everyone involved saw this as a revolutionary shift to matching demand to supply. It would have significantly increased the value of semi predictable renewables like wind and solar. For the public utility regulator, who's job it is to keep rates low, this should have been a no brainer. They were just unwilling to even consider changing the utility profit model that has been in place in all of North America for the last 100 years. I have never been so frustrated in all my life.

Trigger warning - this comment contains political stupidity that may anger technical people. Before May 1, 2025 the spot price of electricity in Ontario, Canada, Ohio and Pennsylvania would vary in March between $-0.02/kWh and $1.50. In the summer it might break $5/kWh. Other than a few industrial consumers, most people didn't pay this. The over price consumers paid during low demand paid for the subsidized price they pay during peak demand. This removes any incentive to switch when you consume electricity. Today, with the added fees that are charged per kWh, the change in price between peak demand and low demand, don't make it worth anyone's effort to shift when they consume electricity. I'm not going to finish doing laundry at 1am for a 20% savings in electricity.

I once worked on a pilot project to have people pay closer to the spot price and to give them the ability to automatically shift some demand. At the end of the month people were given the old billing price and the new spot price method and only had to pay the lesser of the two. The median savings for people who took advantage of the new pricing was $50/month (people in Oklahoma have huge air conditioners and no home insulation). The monthly savings to OG&E were non trivial per customer and they would have saved 2.2B by not needing to build peaker plants.

The politics of how Electric utilities are funded meant this wasn't viable. OG&E's profits are guaranteed to be 12% of whatever capital they have built. The 2.2B in peaker plants were already approved and would have increased OG&E's profit by 260M a year. Investors would have borrowed at 3.75% (US prime rate in 2016) and gotten a 12% return. Expanding the pilot from 100,000 homes to all of Oklahoma, if successful would have meant not having to build the peaker plants. The Oklahoma regulator would not budge giving OG&E any reason to go with the cost saving approach so the project was scrapped and the peaker plants built.

And like Bansky no one but an asshole wants to be the one to be blamed for revealing who he is.

If an entity has lost its copy of a creative work then the copyright should be voided. There is no possible way the entity could further profit from something they can't distribute and they have violated their part of the contract with society by not giving the work to society when the copyright expires. This should also be true of any media if at the end of the copyright society would not be able to fully enjoy the work of art. This means for video games or computer programs if the entity owning it must produce the working program, the code to compile to make the program and a working machine to run the program on.

Building planes and ships and fast cars always seems sexy but how many car companies are profitable for decades without subsidies, government bailouts, tariffs, special tax breaks and the ability to externalize costs like pollution? If we look at the path to becoming a high income country, heavy industry is not the path. Services, software, toys, appliances, luxury items, computers, are the path. The old communist countries were making almost as much steel, ships and planes as the west and their incomes were a fraction of what we have. My kids want walkable cities. They don't want to spend 20% of their disposable income on buying, maintaining and insuring a car. The sooner we stop politically choosing industries to protect and let market forces decided what to make the better.

Americans just didn't know it. There are no consequence to the US president violating the constitution. The US constitution isn't a legal document in the sense that it doesn't clearly state rules and consequences for breaking them. Most of it reads like campaign promises. The US congress has always been useless and corrupt. The concept of a nation state wasn't invented (reinvented) until Napoleon. The USA was at its founding a union of 13 independent countries. The slogans, er, constitution never worked. The American civil war was a lie, it was a conquest by one group of countries over another. The US congress was useless as the executive of the government so the full time presidency was invented, and then given all the power to run a government that the US constitution never envisioned. So the President became the sole controller of the armed forces and the executive of the government. Almost all US federal government workers answer to the President. The President can tell those workers to do anything he wants and there are no guards against it. So even if the President violates the rules, if the majority of congress let him, there is no other mechanism to stop him.

We jail punish people to
1. deter others,
2. to protect society from criminals
3. to reform criminals

I very much doubt jailing this man will do any of these three things. In the mean time we have given up our privacy and allowed the government yet another powerful way to track us.
So, other than revenge, can anyone say society is better off because of this new power to solve old crimes?

The waste from the Oklo natural nuclear reactor has moved only centimeters in the last 2 billion years. So we know if you just bury the waste in the right type of rock you will be fine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

And let the free market decide the best way to solve global warming. Full buses are so much more environmentally friendly you could run them on coal and be better for the environment than all the cars they replace, even if those cars were electric. Cities should only be deciding what busses are the cheapest to run. They shouldn't be betting on technologies or virtue signaling with their purchases.

Everyone wants the services the data centers provide. They want their data in their country, they want facebook, slashdot...and but those all need ads as well. People want to work from home and their companies don't want to host their own data. Oh and voters want the taxes, the construction jobs and the good pay jobs running the data center. The electric grid wants a large, paying customer that has a predictable electricity that doesn't have a peak at the same time as the rest of the gird. So everyone wants the data center just no one wants it near them. Kind of like landfills, homeless shelters and new housing. NIMBY

Americans are 5% of the worlds population but pay for 75% of the commercialization of new drugs and procedures. As much as the rest of the world criticizes US healthcare we are fine leaching off it and accepting the new drugs it produces. In fact of the remaining 25% of bringing new stuff to market the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation has been responsible for some of it. They don't spend a lot in global terms but they are very effective in what they do spend on.

You can have a social safety net. Tax those who consume more on themselves and divert that consumption to those who can't consume as much.
But don't distort the labor market to force some companies to pay more than the market value. That stifles innovation and the creation of better paying jobs.
Until 50 years ago the easiest way to earn more was to move to an area with better employment opportunities. Unfortunately there are many high paying jobs in places like California or New York that people can't take because of another market distortion called rent controls. These young people can't take a good job because there is no where for them to live.

Public ownership of the means of production is communism. Do you really think you could run a company? Do you think you could, along with your fellow citizens, elect someone among you to run a company? Also it doesn't matter who owns means of production. What matters is consumption. How much you get to consume. When farming efficiency massively increased did the extra farmers starve because they were out of work? No the price of food fell and the extra workers were freed to make other things. It's just that with regulations and rent controls human labor is less flexible than it was 500 years ago but we can fix that.
Also back to your public ownership idea. The poor spend everything they make and then some, the middle class invests a tiny bit, the super rich reinvest almost everything they make. Your government acts like the poorest of the poor, consuming more than they take in. Almost every democratic government would pull a Venezuela, not reinvest any profits and run their businesses into the ground.

Looking at the comments so far, a lot of people think they are entitled to a high paying job.
The most anyone, without coercion, will pay you is the marginal value you add to their product.
If you make something that can be used many times or by many people you are more valuable than someone who makes a single product. So a software developer who's code can run on many computers and be sold many times, or Taylor Swift who can write a single song that is listened to billions of times, is more valuable than someone does one off things like planting a tree.
If you make others more productive. Leaders make more because them being 1% more effective makes many people 1% more effective.
If you control capital you are more valuable. Accountants, bankers and stock brokers who move tens of millions a year are valuable because being just slightly better at these jobs can mean millions of gains.
If machinery, or automation has significantly changed your job recently then you are more valuable than you were before.
If none of those are true then don't expect the value of your labour to have increase.