You're so brave!

Your Example Dell PC doesn't "need your leftover keyboard, mouse, and monitor", because Dell is happy to sell you new ones if you'd rather not supply your own.

Mac Mini is the same.

I already have collars for my solar-powered cows.

Current base price for a Mac Mini is $599. So, there's that.

If that's a barrier to entry, it's one that is shared by 90% of the (non-laptop) PC market, and it never seemed to bother PC users. It's not like Apple won't happily sell you a keyboard, mouse, and monitor along with your Mac Mini, if that's what you want to do.

Comparable to, say, a 787 airliner, whose environmental damage we tolerate without thought or comment simply because we're already used to it.

Consider the alternative, then. Anthropic does nothing, and sooner or later OpenAI or some other less responsible company delivers an AI with similar capabilities, but just throws it out to the public without much thought about the consequences. Both the black hats and the white hats start using it, of course, but the black hats have a field day compromising anything and everything before the white hats have a chance to find, fix, and distribute all the necessary patches to defend against all the newfound exploits. Not a great situation to be in, but probably unavoidable at this point unless the white hats are given a head start.

The capacity in the cited article is peak power. Divide by 3 or 4 to get a reasonable annual energy estimate. It's still a surprising and encouraging trend.

The sun's energy hitting a photocell that is not turned into electricity is also waste heat, and that's waste heat that's very hard to put to use.

Wood contains a lot of minerals. Much of this remains in the ash, which is part of the reason some land is cleared by fires. Some of the minerals are airborn, and that's pollution.

There have been some scientific reports that the sound from wind generators is detrimental to whales. I don't know how valid those reports are, but they're something to be considered.

Conservatives want the U.S. to be self-sufficient with petroleum. They want Europe to not have to depend on petroleum from Russia.

40 years ago leftists were having hissy fits about diamonds from the Union of South Africa. Petroleum is far more important and the Islamist and Russian governments far more dangerous.

It can be overcast for weeks at a time, and low wind for a few days. With that in mind, your analysis still looks like a valuable contribution, but a bit too optimistic.

Pumped hydro efficiency is in the range of 70% to 80%. That's a lot of waste. The the ability to make pumped hydro depends heavily on local geography. Substantial capacity would require building new reservoirs, and many environmentalists are already unhappy with the reservoirs already in place. They aren't maintenance-free, but I'd guess the effective mean time between refurbishments is not much different than lithium batteries.

History is littered with the corpses of seemingly immortal companies. The East India Company is centuries gone. General Motors went bankrupt and the name now exists on top of a new corporation. The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company is a shadow of its former dominant self, and Sears Roebuck is dying. Standard Oil and Bell (AT&T) were shattered by the U.S. government.

But I thought the way it worked is a bunch of workers agree to strike if their demands are not met.

That's done by majority vote. If 49% of the employees want to work, they will often be prohibited either because the business requires most people to be working or the company can't run at all (think steel mill) or they'll be physically threatened.