I regret to inform you that you have woefully underestimated it. The actual retail rate offered to consumers is closer to $2200 US per gallon. Sources: internet-ink.com, cbc.ca. This $14 million fine is only worth like, seven thousand gallons, or less than 200 oil barrels of ink.

“Good artists copy, great artists steal” - Pablo Picasso

I believe the classic line between copying and synthesis is taking from three artists or more.

The author is allowed to not give a flying fig about that. Or anything else.

It makes no sense to spend more to tiptoe through costly incremental steps of infrastructure buildout buying stuff you crave to be rid of when you can hop right to the conclusion. Fuel is bad. You use it and then you need more fuel. That's a vulnerability to the fuel supplier, the logistics, the free market for fuel, changing government meddling. Fix it right once without fuel and be done with it for 30 years. It's not like there won't be another problem to solve the next day.

>as they are not allowed to use oil or coal

Or natural gas. No carbon. Carbon fuels amplify the already obscene thermal output by at least 2.5.

Also, none of them is dumb enough to go fission. The time to power is an order of magnitude greater than their expiration date if they don't have it. And their server and power costs are bad enough. They don't need to compound those expenses with the costliest source of energy available.

Never sounded so good.

The transistors aren't actually smaller. They fit more of them in the same 2 dimensional area by using layers. The layers are the Z dimension. The thermals are an interesting question.

The transistors aren't actually smaller. It's standard in the field to market the next chip generation as a smaller size when they mean equivalent to the new size. In this case the transistors are stacked vertically so looking down you get layers X areal density of the 2 dimensional surface. We don't do this with flash stacks, which now have up to 321 layers and are mapped to 1000+.

The angstrom scale business is marketing fluff to make the density increase understandable to consumers. But this is one of the developments leveraging the Z dimension that are legitimate progress. The Z dimension gives more than just the same chip folded like origami. The net distance traveled by a signal in a cycle can be reduced, which yields massive improvement in performance without additional cost of power/heat.

How about basic affordable health care for all by making the billionaire class pay some reasonable tax rate? Instant increase in well being along with eventual increased life span. No medical breakthrough required.

Because road infrastructure is free. Just lay down a strip of Acme Instant Roadway Tape and drive to you're hearts content.

Welcome to 1995.

Might as well spread the joy around developing challengers (not like that!). It's not like the prime mover in New Space is going to need any part of NASA's whopping $40b annual budget.

Selling your body scans as a VR skin. AI enhanced, naturally.

We're going to Mars. This is unstoppable money now. They raised three years of NASA budget in one day, becoming worth more as a company than the accumulated total budget of NASA since inception, adjusted for inflation.