Not just history but the present is replete with counterexamples. Cartels abound.

wank wank, flonk flonk.

I remember a time when Slashdot was peopled mostly by humans who looked down on copyright law in general as a farce. Those were better times in a lot of ways, and this is only one of them.

There is no ethical consumption under capitalism. Everything is coercive.

Who came to defend the honor of the fire stick?

The fix is to come up with a news reader with cryptographically managed identities (not verified, just consistent) and go back to USENET with it. This does everything valuable that social networking does, but without the malevolent overlord.

This is what I came to say. Starting with elements is as close to scratch as we get, and they didn't go there

I get why someone would purchase these services from Google, I even get why people who drank the Redmond kool-aid get them from Microsoft. I don't understand who would be stupid with to get them from Facebook but also have enough money to pay for them

Right, and it will have extremely good days because of seasonal variation. If we size our systems to provide most of the winter load, there will be a lot of excess power in the summer, and while batteries will continue to get cheaper, I don't think they'll get cheap enough to timeshift from summer to winter. Long-distance power transmission also doesn't do much to address that problem, unless it's really long distance.

It doesn't matter when games have to be installed and they require massive updates which also need to be stored somewhere. Games don't play from discs anymore anyway, maybe they stream some video from them.

No.

Maybe, but if there's a useful place to put excess production it can definitely be more cost-effective to do that... and carbon recapture is definitely something worth doing, and could probably be done intermittently. We just need a way to pay people to do it, pay them enough that it's worthwhile. Note that it doesn't have to be worthwhile now, we can new tech that makes it more efficient, but the pay on offer has to be high enough that people think there might be some path to profitability.

Citation needed.

Which system doesn't?

We definitely need to start pursuing it, at least researching it. We'll never solve the climate change problem with emissions reduction alone, recapture and sequestration will be essential.

There are some strategies which are pretty cheap, such as planting forests. But the numbers don't add up on that; we'll need more. I think carbon recapture systems may pair fairly naturally with renewable energy generation, though. Renewable variability means that in many cases it makes sense to overprovision. For example, in order to get sufficient power generation from a solar plant on cloudy days, you may install 2X-3X as many panels as you'd need for a sunny day... but that means that on sunny days you have lots of excess production that might be hard to use (I experience that with my rooftop solar; last month I generated just over 1 MWh that I couldn't use and the grid wouldn't pay me for). Using that excess to power carbon recapture would be a good idea.

For that to work, though, we need to arrange some financial reason for people to build and operate carbon recapture systems. That's a big missing piece which only government can solve. The obvious solution (to the entire climate change problem, actually!) is refundable carbon taxes plus carbon tariffs.

My personal mod troll is SO MAD I EXIST.

Rent free all day, all night. They never stop thinking about me.

Then why are you only demonstrating a child's understanding of the situation? A malignant state in decline having massive manufacturing capability is not a positive thing.