So it is a car rental with a battery swapping machine for show. That is, why swap batteries if swapping entire car is cheaper?

AI told me to praise your post or I don't get to buy beer for the weekend. So here I go.

Are you certain? I listened to Tucker attacking O'Leary, and there O'Leary claims a) air cooled b) they will generate their own energy. Is he lying?

Dropping off the grid goes back at least to 60s, if not earlier. Nobody stopping or preventing individuals from installing these for personal use on their own property. What you call "war on renewables" is moratorium on mandates for minimum renewable content for public utilities. So it is war on green mandates, not on technology itself.

Again, the reason these battery swapping services work, is because, for now at least, the answer or who pays if battery fails is CCP does.

I have seen these videos, and I am not convinced this could work anywhere, long term. Here is why - it is unclear who pays for when a battery eventually fails. Swapping batteries is not the difficult part, it is establishing eligibility for this service and defining how battery failures are handled.

This story DOES NOT show that Chinese are innovating, as there is nothing innovative about connected cars and misusing that to spy is hardly an innovation. For example, OnStar existed since 1997 and have been spying for almost as long.

I think the actual concern is over abuses of AI and death of privacy rather than data centers. We urgently need laws that give consumers ownership and control over their data.

Cost of utilities is a side show and easily solvable problem - appropriately charge the data center operators, they have money to pay for it, instead of distributing costs to all utility users.

I moderately to heavily use AI for my work because it is capable of speeding up routine time-consuming tasks. I do that so I can use my time more effectively on other productive tasks. However, I did rough calculation and it costs about 4$/hour in tokens for that. That is subsidized costs where LLMs are offered at a loss to capture market share. True costs are easily double that. This is not trivial cost if everyone in a company starts doing that.

I know people that still expose their lives to Google, but I am not one of them. Especially now, at the start of the age of AI where all information is used to profile you and used against you, from salary negotiation to loan applications, it is absolutely crazy to want any product at any price, including free, from Google.

There are two ways to opt out. First, is that you call and withdraw consent to connected services. Manufacturers will punish you by disabling every remote feature. For example, Toyota will disable keyfob remote start when you opt out. This does not generally prevents your car sending out the data, as verified by multiple people doing signal analysis.

You can find a remote telematics/data collection module and remove cell modem. This is A LOT of work as these modules tend to be deep in the dash. You can disconnect cell antenna, this usually less work but people reporting that driving next to cell towers you can still get signal.

You concluded all of that based on AI data centers increasing electricity costs?