Solar is a great way to shave peak demand in the late afternoon and evening when combined with batteries, but it cannot provide baseload power during the night or when the sun is not shining. You need natural gas, nuclear, hydroelectric, or coal(!) for that. But is a great thing as long as Congress quits subsidizing it. It isn't economically efficient to do so (excess deployment due to subsidies make retail electric rates go up not down) and we have a $2T a year budget deficit and we cannot afford it. Same for wind, with slightly different characteristics and more unreliability than solar. Like no wind for weeks in the winter sometimes.

This is what the article actually says:

"A customer can also choose a £649 "lifetime" subscription, but that is tied to the car, not the individual. If you sell your car and buy another ID.3, you would have to pay the fee again."

I agree. If you buy enough power you will get better rates as a commercial customer, in part due to economies of scale and lower transmission costs based on shorter distances, higher voltages, and higher currents to large and relatively large three phase commercial installations. And they usually get time of day pricing as well, sometimes down to the five minute level and usually can adjust demand appropriately. In some states residential and small business customers are punished in the form of higher tiered rates for buying more than the expected amount of power for customers like them however.

Electric utilities generally charge different, lower rates to residential customers than to commercial and business customers and cross subsidize residential customers from the rates charged to commercial customers accordingly. So the public utilities commissions or other regulators involved can simply tweak their pricing formulas so that residential customers feel minimal impact if any from extra loads placed by large datacenter installations.

Furthermore generative AI uses so much power that most new datacenters are having their own mostly natural gas power generators and large batteries installed "behind the meter" in N+1 configurations for reliability, and those generally do not directly affect the external, public power grid and prices charged to utility customers especially residential customers at all, except in some ways to make the electrical grid more reliable through peak shifting and by providing short term backup power.

Contract law is a state matter, so I imagine it would be just short of impossible for the federal government to *preempt* state level restrictions on noncompete agreements especially when both parties are in the same state. However, employment law is already heavily constrained by federal law, and has been since the Fair Labor Standards Act in the 1930s. But there states still can and do enact higher standards and tighter restrictions, such as higher, state specific minimum wages requirements and restrictions on noncompetes in California is a good example of that. Fortunately, federal preemption of state law is relatively rare, and is usually based on incorporation of some part of the federal Constitution (such as the First Amendment) against the states.

But as for making noncompetes unlawful nationwide, at least for all but the most highly paid employees, and with reasonable duration restrictions on those, I completely agree. Employees and others should have a right to make a reasonable living with the knowledge and skills they have obtained through their hard work, effort, and diligence as long as they preserve trade secrets and other proprietary information generally governed separately by non-disclosure agreements.

If you knew *anything* about how generative AI systems actually work - think stochastic regurgitation - you would not say such things. I wouldn't trust any such AI system any further than I could throw it. For non-entertainment purposes, such systems are only usable if you are smarter than than the AI *and* double check everything. Contemporary AI systems are subject to model collapse, confabulation, delusional behavior, anti-social or amoral goal seeking if given any kind of leeway, and on and on, as has been well established for quite some time now. And they are only gradually improving in those respects because those weaknessess are fundamental to the way they work. There is no there there - no logic, no reasoning, no reality, no morality, or anything like those things - just garbage in, garbage out.

I don't know, but no one should be burning plastic except at very high temperatures in incinerator and definitely not breathing in the fumes. It just sounded like a ridiculous number to me unless there really are hundreds of millions if not billions of people in the habit of doing so. Possible damage from use of things like plastic water bottles isn't even going to register except as a rounding error. Can't say I lose much sleep about that. But smoky fires are a real problem, and not just from plastic. So if anyone is actually doing that they should just quit, and quit blaming the plastics industry if they are doing something so remarkably stupid.

No one in their right mind believes that plastics are causing 1.5 trillion dollars a year in health related damages. If every household in the world started burning plastics in smoky fires and breathing in as much of the fumes as they could tolerate it would be difficult to reach a figure like that.

Any engineer who says "eliminates fire risk" about something like a grid scale battery is either incompetent or lying. If they were honest they would say something like "greatly reduces fire risk" instead. Everything burns and high power, ionized fluid and reactive metal containing components and conductors burn more readily than average, especially when heat and current are flowing through them. Try getting a copper wire not to burn at high temperatures with lots of current flowing through it outside of a vacuum sometime. Superconductors would not eliminate the fire risk in the battery cells or flow zones either - not even close - probably not even in a vacuum.

Contemporary AI is not so much artificial intelligence as artificial stupidity. This is one of many examples along the same or similar lines.

Things like this are a good reason to cut off all of Myanmar's Internet traffic or at least block it in every civilized country until it gets its act together, prosecutes the offenders, and shuts facilities like this down - all of them. And that goes for every other country where the government doesn't seem to care about mass fraud in known or easily discovered locations within their borders. Seriously - people suffer due to this and a country that harbors this should be considered a criminal enterprise or not much of a country at all.

The average web application is ten to one hundred times slower over the Internet compared to not so very long ago, so maybe they should care. Electricity, transmission lines, power distribution, cooling, and cpu time are not the sort of things one should be gratiuitously wasting either, no matter how popular it is to do so right now.

I wonder if these will have academic studies in a few years showing they create a high risk of rare forms of cancer the way studies showed the mRNA based COVID "vaccines" did. If not, no thanks. It is no fun to die a painful death or to lose someone you love and see them die a painful death either.

I generally agree with all that, but I am still not impressed. It is partly due to rapidly declining educational standards where newly graduating programmers need to have remedial classes so they know how and are not afraid to make a phone call or write an email in complete sentences. Writing a compiler for a serious programming language? Apparently that is just short of unheard of, and when I was in school you practically couldn't graduate in computer science without taking a class like that and almost everyone did. I used to write or port video games that ran on machines (like the Amiga, the Atari ST, and the Atari 7800) with as little as 4K of RAM and 16K of ROM, and you had better believe no one wanted to ship a video game cartridge with any visible bugs in it, or something on floppy disks with serious bugs in it either. I had managers yell at me for not being able to fit a cutting edge golf game into 512K of RAM on an Amiga when I was seventeen. It would have worked fine in HAM mode with 4096 colors but the publisher (Accolade actually) insisted that it absolutely had to fit in 512K and took responsibility for the Amiga version away from me and shipped a rather less exciting 32 color version because their requirements were that demanding.

And these days programmers waste RAM like water - and in many (but certainly not all) environments they can afford to, and no one cares. If every version for twenty years is slower and uses more resources than the year before no one really cares just as long as the bottom line looks okay and they can hire the cheapest and least competent programmers possible to get a (bleep) poor job done before moving onto the next bug infested piece of software. And even the *biggest* and most reputable companies do this as a matter of course. Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, and Adobe produce some great software but overall their software quality has either gone done hill or done nothing much for twenty years. And Internet standards are actually going backwards, especially with the introduction of ever slower versions of DNS, the ridiculous idea that we should use HTTPS everywhere, some of the most inefficient RPC protocols ever devised, the advent of resume driven development SPA web applications and on and on.

Back in the 90s software, including Internet software used to be *fast*, and if you didn't push the limits of the laws of physics you were a bad programmer. And how many companies and how many programmers do that any more? Approximately none of them, if they even know how or use a language that doesn't suffer embarassing pauses and run ten times as slow as what is reasonably possible. Electrical engineers and engineers in materials science know how to push the boundaries of the laws of physics, but on average software engineers stink and are not allowed to dedicate the time and the resources to do anything they should actually be proud of and look at themselves in the mirror in the morning with anything but barely disguised disgust. Someone or some group of people ought to do something about that. I intend to do so (to the degree I can of course) and I hope others do to. I am embarrassed to work on products and services from poorly managed software and services companies with managers, executives, CEOs, boards of directors, and shareholders that just don't care (tm).

Very very few software developers deserve the title "engineer" at all, and not just because they haven't or couldn't pass the FE exam. Software quality has been in free fall for a couple of decades now for a variety of reasons. That is not all the software developers fault of course, but if you can't write code in some serious high performing programming language that could be put in ROM and perform according to spec without any serious bugs for at least a century you are basically incompetent compared to video game programmers who used to count cycles on 8 and 16/32 bit machines and produce reliable, nearly bug free software that was often burned into ROM and still works in emulation today or write code that could control safety critical embedded equipment where failure means death or injury, human spaceflight controls with similar consequences, or any kind of software where a major failure means a financial or other catastrophe that results in human suffering, major loss of life, disclosure of massive amounts of information like that you *definitely* do not deserve the title "software engineer" at all.

Ask a real engineer sometime, someone that deserves the title - they operate under such constraints as a matter of course, if they fail to do their jobs bad things like I described happen, and the professional ones bear personal and professional liability if a design for something like a bridge or a building catastrophically fails. There was a time when if an architect or engineer designed a structure that failed and killed someone, the consequence was the death penalty or at least permanent revocation of their professional license.

It would be nice to bring that level of seriousness and quality, reliability, and performance back instead of cutting and pasting random bits of (possibly low quality "AI' generated) code and tweaking it until it pretends to work like someone with a seventh grade education and then shipping the abysmally low quality result every couple of weeks and planning to fix the bugs sometime in the next decade if you or someone who works there or who calls the shots ever gets around to it at *all*. Some who claims to be a software developer (or worse a "software engineer") should act like they are smarter or at least more responsible than a fifth grader.