I doubt that the product is actually getting worse, and I have good reason for my doubt.

Nearly all of the things like this that Google does have one real purpose: Combating abuse. During my ~15 years at Google I never worked on counter-abuse, but I spend about a decade doing stuff that led me to work pretty closely with the counter-abuse teams, and the inventiveness of the people abusing Google's products and systems never ceased to amaze me. And it isn't trivial abuse that is ignorable, because not preventing the abuse would actually make the product offerings worse.

I don't know what the storage abuse might be, but I can think of a lot of things that could be done, and my experience touching on counter-abuse at Google taught me that for every thing I can think of, there are people out there who can think of a hundred more, and will then invest serious amounts of time and money in implementing them.

One of my favorite examples was related to Android GPS location. It's a favorite mostly because of how trivial it was, but the vast resources abusers poured into it, and I'm sure they only did it because they got even more out of it -- this large-scale abuse is all for-profit. For a long time it was easy to spoof your location without giving any evidence of the fact. This caused problems for location-based games like Pokemon Go or Ingres, who lost players because it screwed up the game[*]. So, the games started checking if the device was in developer mode, which allowed "legitimate" location spoofing. So cheaters started using bootloader-unlocked devices which they could configure to lie about being in developer mode. So games started using Android Keystore attestation (I wrote Keystore, hence why I got pulled in) to make it difficult to impossible to do that. Except that some number of official attestation keys leaked out of factories and people found they could get those and fake out the games. Also, there were some crappy devices that didn't do the Keystore security right. If you bought one of those cheap devices and modified the software, you could cheat

To this point, it's fine. Just normal security cat-and-mouse, and it keeps the number of cheaters small enough not to matter, so it's fine. But someone decided to scale it, for a fee. Someone (or some ones) set up massive device farms. One organization made some mistakes that leaked a bit of device information and allowed us to count the devices in the farm and there were tens of thousands. What did they do? They arranged to help Pokemon Go players spoof their location. If you played Pokemon Go and wanted to cheat, you could pay $5 per month and they'd give you a customized version of the game that would let you spoof your location but whenever the game asked for an attestation it would get one from one of the farm devices, all of which were hacked to be able to lie about their configuration.

That's just one example, and there are an unbelievable number of others. I recently chatted with a friend on the counter-abuse team and they are really tearing their hair out over some of the incredibly clever attacks people are mounting with AI. She couldn't give me details (and if she had, I couldn't share them).

Anyway, what's really going on here, I'm sure, is that there's some large-scale, systematic abuse of GMail storage that is to a degree that it's costing Google hundreds of millions of dollars. What exactly, I have no idea. And they think that they can address it by reducing storage for people who won't take a simple step to prove that they're real people (phone number verification). Obviously, phone number verification doesn't prove that you're a real person... but it increases the cost of large-scale abuse, and that's the point. I'm sure there will be other I'm-a-person verification schemes so those without phones have an option, but all of them will aim to inconvenience abusers and increase their costs, without too-greatly inconveniencing legitimate users.

[*] My personal experience: I played Ingres quite a lot for a couple of years, but quit it completely after one cheating event, and never went back. I spent a whole day climbing a 10,000-foot mountain peak, covered in deep snow, in the dead of winter, to capture a key portal, only to have it taken away from me 30 minutes later by someone who definitely didn't climb the mountain. I know because if they'd been there, I'd have seen them. Pissed me off so bad I deleted the app and never installed it again.

Wood burning is very much alive - both old-stylee polluting open-fires and stoves, and ultra-efficient pellet, wood-chip and wood dust burning in power stations. And it's renewable. Try visiting any nordic country some day...

Also, just because burning wood has downsides doesn't mean it has to be ditcheds it entirely. Solve the downsides instead...

Unless you're cooking brisket every day, and so are a lot of your neighbors, it's not likely to be a problem.

Where it becomes an issue is when a non-trivial number of people are using it for heating their homes... which is not that uncommon in the Mountain West.

It used to be very common where I live (northern Utah), and likely would be still, but the density of woodsmoke was enough that when combined with common winter weather conditions ("temperature inversions" that trap a layer of air 2-3 thousand feet deep in the bowl created by surrounding mountains), it became a health hazard. To combat that, the government instituted "no burn days" when using a wood-burning stove in your home was prohibited. Those became common enough that most people eventually found burning wood (and coal) for home heating was annoying.

When I was a kid, my home was primarily heated with wood, plus a bit of coal at night. The house had a gas furnace, but we could cut several cords of wood from the mountains for a permit that cost about $10, plus another $30 in gas -- and our time and sweat, of course, but given the family finances, labor was cheap. That ended in the mid-90s because there were so many no-burn days that my dad gave up.

However, it's still quite common in less densely-populated areas of the Mountain West. This information may change the calculation of how dense is too dense to allow heating with wood.

A large mass of cryogenic fuel/oxidizer right up against the other side of a thermally-conductive dome also makes a great heat sink. Warming the fuel will cause it to expand, but after burning a lot to get up there, tankage is not a problem.

They should put those taxes on the commercial users that do the most damage and let the prices of goods transported by truck reflect the costs.

Oh look, some fuck with Zoom stock stopped off to moderate here.

Have to pay fuel tax and use a LPG tank rated for fuel use

" Honda design is typically more well thought out than a GM or Ford or Nissan vehicle"

Unless it's a Honda EV SUV and then it's made by GM.

Yeah but he only went because it was his first chance to hang out with the guy he said was a pedo

The current administration is not only not interested in that, the mission is obviously to destroy things only.

But prior administrations weren't interested in change either, it's been status quo or worse for decades.

Yeah, especially with the Northstar V8, then they were just as unreliable and expensive to repair

This isn't about Office. This is about Office 365 and Azure, and how a license is bundled when you use Azure but unbundled if you wanted to use 365 and, for example, AWS.

It's a shame because I wish they would, but the gov.uk link explicitly talks about "CMA’s cloud market investigation – Microsoft’s use of software licensing reducing competition in cloud".

This won't be what people are hoping for here - actual Office. This is purely about licensing costs with regards to cloud deployments.

There is, and it's protectionism and cronyism.

Here in California, PG&E literally burned down [much of] Paradise[, CA] by skipping maintenance for literally 99 years.

Yes, and what this article is about is the value of the service declining, so people are leaving for services with a better value proposition.

Also, nuclear plant produces power, AI datacenter consumes it. Nuke plants won't make their power cheaper, but they also won't make it unavailable .