"Except Apple."

They are immune to the so-called laws of economics.

To the point, they pay for their utilities - water and electricity. For some reason people seem to think industry gets utilities for free and then the residential users have to pay for it? It's silliness. The utilities require upfront fees and contracts before making an investment for a big new consumer.

There isn't a shortage of water in Michigan.

And then we get this: " Last month, Township attorney Douglas Winters told the Board of Trustees that building hosting the data center would make Ypsilanti Township a "high value target." He pointed to the recent bombing of Gulf Coast data centers by Iran as evidence. "

They're grasping.

Forbes has a guess:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/t...

Microsoftâ(TM)s standard severance package previously included 12 weeks of base pay plus two additional weeks for every year of employment, though this could vary depending on tenure and level. When the company laid off 10,000 employees in 2023, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said his firm would offer benefit-eligible employees six months of health care and stock vesting and 60 days of notice in addition to severance. If a 20-year employee whose salary totaled $180,000, their severance package would offer $180,000, though itâ(TM)s likely this would be larger for higher-level workers.

Two weeks pay for every year of employment, up to a year of pay, seems to be kind of common in buyouts.

He's 65 years old and worth almost $6B. But no, he must keep his nose to the grindstone or he'll be a rat abandoning a sinking ship. Couldn't just be sailing off into the sunset in a megayacht, why would somebody want to do that?

Sometimes the 1000 lb gorilla has the worst odds of leading the next generation because they're still making good money on the old model during the years when they would have to be building a lead in the new model, but doing that would destroy the old (highly profitable, for them) model even faster.

Online I keep hearing I'm supposed to be jealous of the EU with their great "UN Quality of Life Index" scores and whatnot, but it sure is getting heavy-handed over there.

Pretty common to hold somebody in jail on whatever charge is easiest to prove so they don't run away while you are investigating and preparing to file bigger charges.

Well, you can make the hydrogen easier to handle by binding it to carbon... Perhaps synthesizing jet fuel with carbon recaptured from the atmosphere will win, since it doesn't require modifying the planes and the new tech is on the ground.

There's legitimacy to that. Taking a potentially dangerous drug under the supervision of a doctor who knows how things are supposed to work, what side effects look like, with drugs of consistent purity and dosage, has a lot of advantages over winging it with stuff made up random chinese chemicals and toilet bowl cleaner.

Unless you're talking about cocaine etc. brought to the penthouse by a personal assistant or something. Plenty of ultra-rich celebs have killed themselves that way.

How can it be that? Survival has never been more assured. I wonder if we'd be less depressed if we had to do physical labor for food and fight the neighboring tribe once in a while to punctuate life with more immediacy and urgency.

I do think what you're describing will be the future for the most part. We aren't going to be digging through layers of gui menus or doing keyword searches to try to find a setting. You'll just tell it what you want in plain speech and it will do it.

As for the demise of apps could there be a platform based on an AI that knows how to generate information displays and retrieve various information, and each 'app' is just set of prompts for the AI? Not sure. But I'm sure it will be tried.

I wonder if this threshold was ever surpassed when "electronic mail" was one of the main internet applications. I remember hearing that a large majority of emails were spam many years ago.

Is $1.68B for a battery a lot? Building a 1 GW natural gas plant costs $1â"1.5B. Then you pay $200M per year for gas, forever. Or $600M per year in Europe.

Of course, the energy to charge the battery isn't free either. But these numbers are getting to be in the same ballpark like never before.

No I think you're mistaken. The capacity is 800 MW, with a capacity factor of 40%-50%, which assuming 1 kW on average per home comes out to about 350,000 or 400,000 homes.