Cheapest per mile, sure. But there are a lot more miles between China and the US than there are between Detroit and Windsor.

That is not what price elasticity means. Price elasticity is the percentage change in quantity demanded divided by the percentage change in price. So if you are selling 100 units a day at $100, and phi is 0.25, then for a four dollar increase in price you would lose one sale per day. It is also not a fixed value; it will change based on the state of the economy, the level of price, and available competition.

If price elasticity is 0, then customers will pay whatever the asking prices is (think cancer drugs; how much would you pay if you had cancer and this drug cured it? Nearly everything, right?), to infinity, e.g. for a basic commodity, where you can sell all you have at the market price, but if you try and charge above the market price, customers all go to your competitors and you sell nothing.

Once again, the people in this administration demonstrate they have no idea what they are doing.

I‘ve been a fan of Anker products for a while, not knowing they were a Chinese company. Chargers, battery packs, cables. Fortunately, I have enough for my needs for a while. I‘m not sure what I‘ll do when it needs replacing.

Apple doesn’t sell iPods any more.

Let's see, I bought a 27" tube TV with stereo sound in 1989 (with S-Video as well as NTSC inputs!), and then a 43" 4K set in 2015 to finally upgrade, and my newest one, another 43" 4K, in 2017 for the guest room, trying to beat tariffs the first time. And there was a 43" 4K computer monitor sometime in there, too. Does that count? I will only buy new TVs/monitors when the old ones die or turn 25, I guess.

Where are my mod points when I need one. Laugh out loud!

The reason why blank media disappeared is because demand evaporated. 800 Megabytes? 5 Gigabytes? Really? No one wants storage that small any more.

A real programmer can write Fortran code in any language.

The source of the joke is that all programming languages have their own unique idioms and features. Some concepts are implemented in many languages, and transfer easily. Others aren't.

Coal power plants around here (southwest ohio) are being decommissioned because they're too expensive to run. Natural gas, wind, and solar are taking their place.

There's an obvious economic driver for shifting demand from when a resources is expensive to when the resource is inexpensive. If a building's owners have a contract with the utility provider for time-of-day billing, and electricity is cheap at night and expensive during the day, then there's incentive for shifting the electric load from day (A/C) to night (power the freezers, and thaw the ice during the day to avoid daytime electric charges).
If the local utility gets enough electricity from solar, and the duck curve means electricity is cheapest in the afternoon, and more expensive at night, then the building owner should just go ahead and run the A/C during the day, and maybe the freezers, too. The capital costs to build the ice electricity time-shifter may or may not still be low enough to fit within the savings the system offers.

I'm still a big fan of gravitational confinement fusion reactors. They're exquisitely simple. You need a safe distance, though.

The old pattern of electricity being cheaper at night, because everyone uses Air Conditioning in the afternoon and demand is at its peak, is going to change. Solar provides power during the day, and not at night. As the fraction of electricity from solar goes up, the increase in afternoon supply will match that daily usage pattern.

The economic justification for batteries is that you fill them when electricity is cheap, and deplete them when it is dear. Utilities will have incentives to match the price customers pay with the supply-and-demand balance.

I started with BASIC, then a little assembly language (that I really didn't get), and then Pascal, APL,C, C++, and then TCL, Prolog, SQL, Rosette, and LDL++ all for one project. When Java came along, that (and HTML and Javascript). Then Python.

How did the work week in America go from 72 hour (6 days, 12 hours per day) to 40 hours? Unions, and then legislation. Of course big employers are going to expect long hours of work for as little pay as possible. There was some violence along the way, as there always is when there's a lot of money at stake. Worth it? Yes.

It keeps the bitcoin that Texas has accepted off the market, limiting supply, keeping the price high for just a little while longer.