I've wondered about this for a while. I was considering getting solar panels and a home battery and this is an option there. But then I thought, I'm buying the battery to tide me over a blackout. If power drops, I want that battery topped off at all times. I don't want to use it as a grid smoothing device because that's just leaving me vulnerable to not having the power I bought it for.

Same thing for an EV. I still have range anxiety. I want the battery always at 100% full when I leave my garage. You'd have to pay me a significant amount to let you drain my car's battery to handle the late afternoon AC surge.

I know, I know, I don't need the full range on the EV every day. It still would cause me anxiety to not have it topped off.

What about domestic use? Can we halt that too?

Did they have any to begin with? I don't think this will help them at all, but their alternative is to drown anyway. For reference, their stock is down 85% over a 5 year period. Maybe this will keep them afloat for a while longer (or more likely make them a more attractive buyout target) or it's just a last gasp for air on the way out (which is where they're less attractive buyout target, but eventually become cheap enough for someone to scoop up).

Presumably it's possible to have freedom of movement while still prohibiting people from establishing residence there. Crossing into Mexico from the U.S. is as hassle free as getting across the border (getting back in is another story) but if I tried to live there without authorization the Mexican government would deport me.

Also Dresden already has fabs owned by GlobalFoundries which were fabs for AMD before they were spun off, so Germany and Dresden in particular make a lot of sense.

Just tell her to buy you a nice shirt. Then when she visits make sure to wear it. She'll appreciate it at lot and if you're anything like me she has better fashion sensibilities and will pick out something nice. One or two new shirts per year is enough to maintain a wardrobe. Your mom is going to want to get you something regardless of you having outgrown birthday or Christmas presents decades ago and their wiring will make them disappointed if you tell them to stop.

Mom is happy that she gets to give a thoughtful gift even if baby is all grown up and if you're like me you'll be grateful that it saves you the time having to look for new clothes yourself. Maybe it's unthinkable when you're younger, but clothes for Christmas is the biggest win-win I've ever stumbled into. Younger readers can double dip and get socks and underwear from grandma.

The upper management at Microsoft is stupid enough to do that, but it won't fix their problems. They have some valuable IP that can sell millions of copies, but they bought a lot of past-their prime studios and have stuffed them with even more bloat to try to churn out sequels faster. Either they never read or understand the Mythical Man-Month. The people are n charge have no real understanding of games' development and treat like something akin to a factory job that can be scaled by adding more lines and workers.

Letting (or making) the developers use AI might make them more productive, but if the only thing it does is allow them to churn out uninspired crap that no one wants to play faster than otherwise, it won't fix their revenue problem. It'll only allow the gradual decline to go on for a bit longer.

Was anyone looking to build a data center in Seattle in the first place? Unless they were going to build something small, there's not enough space to build a new one and repurposing existing buildings for a data center might not be possible even if the rent weren't prohibitively expensive compared to building outside of the metro area. Even if a company like Microsoft wanted to build close to their campus, they'd be building a data center in Redmond instead of Seattle proper. There's still have a much easier time building outside of town because finding a few hundred acres that aren't already developed in a metro area is difficult as well as hideously expensive.

Interestingly, I remember at one time, the whole "Fake it until you make it." slogan meant something much less devious. It used to be a slogan people said about a small business managing to present itself as much bigger than it really was, while delivering on promises and work that would usually only be expected from a much larger business.

To me, that was actually a positive/good thing. It was your classic case of an over-achieving startup, doing more with less and winning outsized contracts that helped it grow to be a formidable competitor with the established players.

I took the financial hit years ago, when I resold my high-end configured Intel Macbook Pro to move to the M1.

As soon as I saw the benefits of the M series processors on the platform, I knew it was the way forward. The Intel Core i9 version of my Macbook Pro had overheating issues where it would throttle its performance down every time it did anything demanding for more than a few seconds at a time. That's just wasted performance at that point.

The battery life on M series is insanely good without feeling like you gave up any processing power at all, which sealed the deal for me.

The idea of Apple using Intel CPUs was always, in my opinion, kind of a hack on Apple's part. They realized IBM wasn't going to live up to their initial promises to keep innovating the "Power" CPU to keep it competitive. There wasn't any real alternative for Steve Jobs and company at that point. They were left "high and dry" unless they just ported everything to run on the same processor all the Windows computers were using.

The M series gets the Mac back to being truly unique again. You're not just buying another Windows laptop on the inside, wrapped in an "Apple shell".

Forget the medical emergency stuff. Every pervert on the island can now helicopter their dick in full view of children knowing that there's no way that the kids will be able to record the crime and expose the exposers.

There are good engineering reasons to avoid replaceable batteries. The strategy has been used with some limited success in China, but charging advances are limiting the utility. They are rolling out EVs that can accept charges at 1MW, which means full charges in under 10 minutes. It does require building out those chargers (which use a large battery to discharge rather than attempting to generate that sort of power directly from the grid), but it's less intensive a lift than battery swap stations. The problem with swap stations is they are by necessity make and model specific, while chargers can be universal.

Setting aside all that, EVs are likely to go down in weight relative to ICE as battery densities and motor designs improve. There is no inherent reason why an EV would create more tire particulates than an ICEV. People who are up in arms about EV weights often don't realize that ICEV weights have also increased quite a bit due to safety and NVH demands.

"You know what I don't like about Texas? It's fucking desolate. Very, very desolate. Which is the main reason I don't want to move there, but I may anyway."

What part of Texas are you referring to? Texas West of San Antonio or North of DFW is pretty desolate, but most of the population of Texas actually lives in the "Texas triangle" which is nothing like West Texas. The natural environment of Houston is actually more of a coastal swamp. It's nowhere near as nice as California on average, but even West Texas is less desolate than Death Valley.

Some of those things are probably profitable if they can gut most of the staff and centralize the maintenance work while cashing the cheques from old people who signed up and keep paying. AOL has been coasting on that for decades already, so it's little wonder they and similar sites have wound up on the island of misfit internet companies. They're not making very much money for the valuation they're after though. The notion that the dozens of millions in profit will be able to turn into hundreds of millions or billions is a pipe dream. This IPO is the private investors trying to get out before the customer base dies off and the cheques stop clearing.

Maybe this is better than the Google approach of killing it off entirely even if it could eke out a meager existence, but it's a business that has no future. Dead or dying internet platforms don't come back. This company is just a hospice for websites and tech companies some people remember from years ago and haven't used in almost as long. There might be money to be made there, but it's not a billion dollar company.