That's why most solar installations in California now have batteries so they can store solar PV energy and avoid buying or selling from the grid.

The US electric grid is based on large generating plants connected by long distance transmission lines. This was the only feasible way to set up the grid when all you had were large generators.
However, with the rise of solar (home and commercial) and battery storage, it is possible to organize the grid as a network of small distributed generators. This reduces the need for long distance transmission and makes the grid more resilient since there are many more sources of energy and the failure of one is insignificant.
California is a good example where a network of home batteries has prevented four major outages this year and was called into use about 15 times to supplement large generators.
A problem is that power companies don't make profits from small scale generation and storage. It actually costs them. Power companies would rather invest in large generating plants and long distance transmission where they get a guaranteed return on investment and well as controlling the market so they can charge high prices.

Which is pants on head retarded.

Both from a moral level, keeping people in debt to ensure they're indentured to someone and from a business perspective as it's a imperial shitton (about 1.8 Metric fuckloads) of risk. In case you don't remember the last time the banks over-leveraged on risky customers, it was only 2008, there was a massive collapse we're still feeling the effects of.

I'm glad my country doesn't have anything of the sort. Experian are trying to "sell" their credit score system but no-one is buying. When you apply for credit here (I.E. home or car loan) your existing credit obligations including potential ones (like a credit card or phone contract) are listed as risks and detract from the amount you can borrow.

I think everyone is over thinking this. NVidia need to do something with that money they're drowning in and there's only so much that can be syphoned off to tax havens before everyone starts asking questions. If they kept it, they'd need to pay tax on it and we can't have that.

What's surprised me in the processor market is AMD making inroads in the laptop space that Intel owned for decades, even when AMD were dominating on the desktop and had very strong server offerings (the Athlon 64/Opteron days, for those who's memories stretch back that far). 15% of laptops are now AMD.

Upgrading budget laptops is how you save.

I have a cheap Asus gaming laptop for travel. It cost me £550 and most of that was for the RTX3050. I was able to pop the back off, add in another 8 GB of RAM, doubling the original and replace the 512 GB SSD with a faster 1TB for less than £100, the next model up that had the same amount of RAM was over £200 more expensive (but it did have a 3060 to be fair).

A lot of budget laptops are deliberately underspec'd to force people afraid to upgrade to buying a far more expensive laptop.

All of this is a moot point anyway, Apple have been hostile to upgrades and repairs for decades, they already spend extra to solder in the hard drives and ram modules. Also anyone who didn't predict that they'd be killing off the Mac line for phone based ones? Anyone still denying that? Mac OS being killed off is next.

That's still 3 million people of the ext. 300 million laptops that get sold each year.

And I'm willing to bet a lot of people are like me who buy a lower spec'd model where I can upgrade the RAM and SSD on the cheap saving a hundred quid off the more expensive one.

However that's besides the point, Apple have been openly hostile to people who want to upgrade (and consumers in general) for years. Plenty of other manufacturers to choose from though.

As a side effect, they're going to become a huge vector for malware.

A fridge will last for a decade or more, they'll stop doing software updates after 7 years maximum, maybe even as low as 2. In fact some may never receive a software update.

They'll just put in defences they will put in place to prevent it.

"Your fridge will shut down in 20 hours unless we're able to reach the Enrichment server" which is also the advertising server.

What needs to happen is laws need to be passed making this shit illegal. There's a reason they're starting in the US, even before their government was more corrupt that all the other tin pot dictatorships put together, there were enough people who were irrationally afraid of competent governance that they'd willingly prevent laws against this kind of thing.

I can see no reason a fridge should ever need to be connected to the internet.

All that does is requires a beeper.

The idiots who leave it open are the kind that want these beepers removed because they find them annoying (erm... it's kind of the point, to get your attention). They're the same kind of people who openly invite being bombarded with ads because they think "they're not affected by them" which is evidenced by the amount of branded crap they don't need strewn around their dwelling.

I want my fridge to reliably keep things cold. Efficiently would be nice, doing so without releasing harmful chemicals would just be a bonus the way things are going.

Consumers don't get a choice.

They don't give a shit either. Try finding a non "smart" TV in the UK because you just want a TV that doesn't have a long boot time or requires network connectivity as you simply want to use it as a display unit for other devices.

People need to petition to make laws to make this kind of shit well and truly illegal. That is unlikely to happen in the US however as making this illegal is "government overreach" and being bombarded with advertisements is "freeze peach". Not likely to fly in the UK though. At least not yet, who knows what will happen after the 3rd glorious decade of total law enforcement thanks to Fuhrer Farage.

And of course the MAGA faithful don't want to see this, so they attempt to suppress it.

I have to wonder, when does it finally dawn on some people that they're on the wrong side of history? I guess for some the realisation never comes, I'm willing to bet some died in the wool German and Italian fascists went to their graves still believing they made the right choice supporting Hitler and Mussolini long after their downfalls.

China is also dumping excess production on the rest of the world. Lots of people have access to good cars at good prices.
I'd love to see these come to the US but our protectionist policies only allow us to buy expensive sub-standard EVs from US manufacturers.

These cars are available in Mexico (and maybe soon Canada). I'd love to buy one and import it to the US as a used car at a much lower tariff.

Good point. It drives me crazy too.
Adding extra zeros is just hype.

Looks like the biggest drop is from reporting student loan delinquencies. Biden's effort to reduce student loan debt has ended.
Instead of free/low cost education like much of the rest of the "civilized" world, the US puts everyone in perpetual penury with massive student loan debt so they have to keep slaving for much of their lives.