Number 7 according to Car & Driver, which I think is much more trustworthy than whatever "Wealthy Driver" is. The Car & Driver list is also applies to 2025 rather than 2023.

https://www.caranddriver.com/n...

On the basis of water usage, no. Depending on the estimate you use, California's almond growers use four to seven times as much water as all US data centers combined. Which industry does more good for you?

Jellyfish that could concentrate heavy metals from the water they live in.
You would let them breed and clean up water in an area, then release a pheromone to get them to jump into your harvester ship, render them and get the contaminants.

They were released in an area with an old nuclear waste dump, so some of the stuff they were concentrating was potentially fissile.
Especially so when the pheromone told them to go up the water intakes at a power plant...

It's not a remotely level playing field. One soldier who took part in the Venezuela raid basically had orders in hand when he placed multiple bets on the timing of the raid, netting a ton of money. There have been many other examples of inside information being used to stack the odds.

This is absolutely not true. There are plenty of people in the financial side of a business that have information that is material but non-public, and trading based on that knowledge is illegal, including sudden cuts in spending, audit results prior to publication, and more. HR will be aware of major layoffs. Facilities might be aware of impending site closures before they're announced. All these things can be used for insider trading.

Lower-level people aren't usually pursued because they're small enough to fly under the radar. But that doesn't mean it's not illegal, and it doesn't mean it never happens.

Right now, it is legal for third parties like Flock to collect surveillance data and offer it for sale to anyone.
The third party doctrine makes it presumed OK for third parties to give or sell their data to the Government.
This is rapidly eroding Fourth Amendment guarantees in the US.

One possible way out would be to specify in federal law that data that can enable mass surveillance must be protected - leaking it gets you fined, government doesn't get it without a warrant.

The HIPAA laws are a potential model here - they basically say data related to health care can only be shared between certain businesses, and only with the permission of the person the data is about.

They already have a planned rotation. There will be two crews, rotating every four hours. This isn't unlike existing long-haul flights, except that instead of the crews rotating at the same time, they will be on two-hour offsets. One pilot will stay for the first four hours, the other for the first two hours. A replacement will swap in at two hours and stay through the sixth hour, and then the other will swap at four hours and stay through the eighth hour, and so on. Qantas said that this will apply to all flights of 20 hours or more.

Most comms software is better handled by a service. Email, chat, phone, etc. Let someone else deal with the problems of maintaining it. Almost everything else is worth discussing.

Potentially, but not necessarily more than they're going to spend on the work.

Maybe Apple sees it as just the right thing to do. Apple has access to enormous volumes of data that they could monetize if they wanted, but they don't. They jumped through a bunch of hoops to make Lockdown Mode that, if the user screws it up, means that everything is lost. They are unlikely to be making money on that, especially since it limits some app installations and functionality, and they're not going to get fined by anyone for not having it. There is, in fact, a real risk that someone is going to fine them for being unable to recover the data.

It might have been okay if the /pol/ people just stayed in their little ghetto, but they cross-posted to the main tab while bringing their (even more than usually) biased moderators. That made the main tab toxic as well.

It holds a legal and fiduciary duty to act in the best interests of its shareholders. Tim Cook rather famously told off an Apple shareholder who asked him to commit to pursuing only programs that would be profitable, saying, "When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don't consider the bloody ROI."

That's just one small example by a powerful CEO after a shareholder initiative was shot down 98-2, but most companies spend money on things that reduce profits or are not profitable. Look at the sprawling HQs with fancy buildings that are set up by so many companies when they could have gone with simple brutalist architecture. There are companies that pay well because it promotes long-term stability even at the expense of short-term profits.

I get that these big companies don't deserve blind trust, but understanding what their obligations are is much more helpful than oversimplifications.

My neighborhood (suburb of Washington DC, near NASA Goddard) has underground utilities.
We have lost power for maybe 12 hours total over the past 30 YEARS.
When there's a lot of wind and rain, we sometimes lose power for seconds, maybe tens of seconds. Outages of more than a minute are extremely rare.
That's why the FIOS box, the routers, and the most important desktop are on small UPS units - primarily to avoid losing work.

Nearby neighborhoods with above ground lines lose power approximately annually, sometimes for days.

Some industries do it. Most run on standard schedules year-round, at least in the US.

Business drive personal schedules. Bigger businesses won't shift because it complicates internal work. That means smaller, local businesses largely won't shift because they often need to match their customers' hours. The end result is that people who are expected to show up at 8:00 for work now will still have to show up for 8:00 then, even if it's two hours before sunrise.

I credit most of SpaceX's success to CEO Gwen Shotwell. She keeps things going even when Musk is off on an irrelevant tear somewhere else.

Unfortunately, Musk seems to be on a path to sabotaging her efforts. The SpaceX prospectus showed that xAI (which bought Twitter, because why not?) was the reason they posted a loss in the last fiscal year. Even with all the expenditures on Starship, SpaceX would have been profitable. Like every other major AI company, it is not at all clear that xAI can reach profitability anytime in the near future, especially since xAI is blocked from so many enterprises and doesn't seem to be able to keep up with the big three at all. As Starship production scales up, the costs are going to increase, and they need payload revenue to offset those costs. There's so much focus now on the Pez dispenser and the lunar mission that I haven't seen any hints of the conventional payload delivery version (aka, "Chomper") in a couple of years. Maybe it's being quietly worked on. I hope so, because the big space station payloads that were talked about a few years ago will need it.